Hors les murs

PHOTO | BRUT
Collection Bruno Decharme
& Compagnie

January 24, 2021–June 6, 2021
At the American Folk Art Museum, New York, USA

After Arles in 2019, the Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie opens at the Folk Art Museum on January 24. The exhibition represents the first international glimpse into self-taught artists in the field of photography. PHOTO | BRUT welcomes the substantial art brut photography collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme and is complemented by the Museum’s holdings, as well as by artworks by American collectors and public organizations.⁠

The exhibition unites more than four hundred early and recent works by forty artists—some recently unveiled, discovered postmortem, or on occasion brought into dialogue with contemporary art, as works by Marcel Bascoulard and Lee Godie have been. This selection, typical of the heterogeneous typology of photography, encompasses a wide spectrum of creations: Aside from traditional photographs, it also gathers collages made from printed materials, artworks that relied on the photographic process, and photographs that were never developed, such as slides and digital images.

To expose relationships between these various, inimitable artistic postures, PHOTO | BRUT is organized in four loose yet interconnected sections, probing themes of gender expansiveness, intimacy, image appropriation, and conjuring practices that seek connections to the imperceptible. These profound bodies of work are often process-based, subversive, and pluridisciplinary. As art historian Michel Thévoz observes, these creators “use the camera to play against type, by making their daily life an unreality or making their chimeras hyperreal. They use photography in spite of or beyond its presumptive objectivity, to imbue fantasy with the stamp of realism or, inversely, to sublimate an ordinary subject.”

Curators: Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Senior Curator, and Bruno Decharme in collaboration with Barbara Safarova, Sam Stourdzé, and Paula Aisemberg.

Learn more: folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/photo-brut


photo: Lee Godie (1908, Chicago, Illinois⁠ — 1994, Plato Center, Illinois; Untitled; c. 1980⁠; Gelatin silver print (from photo booth); 5 x 3 3/4 in.; Collection John and Teenuh Foster; Photo courtesy John and Teenuh Foster. ⁠
Posté le 21.01.2021
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