Michel Thevoz curator of ‘Art Brut: Frame Work’

19.11.2020 Exhibitions

Art Brut: Frame Work – December 11, 2020 through April 25, 2021

Michel Thévoz – in charge of La Collection de l’Art Brut from 1976 to 2001 – is the curator of the upcoming temporary exhibition, Art Brut: Frame Work. Approaching the frame from an unexpected angle, Art Brut: Frame Work urges a rethinking of one of the transcendental norms of our culture. Taken in its broadest sense, the frame performs a primal, fundamental function in the human psyche, shaping an imaginative space at once narcissistic, playful, social, environmental and aesthetic. So thoroughly coextensive with our sensibility and understanding has the frame become that we no longer possess the objectivity needed for an awareness of it – except through the impact of Art Brut as a revelatory form of disruption. Is it the pathological that casts light on the normal? Or the opposite: can the anomalous bring a collective neurosis to the surface? Whatever, the task of this exhibition is to foreground singular, disconcerting treatments of the frame: centripetal or centrifugal, protective or invasive, mediatory or discriminatory, uplifting or parodic, marginal or elemental. Working on the fringes of the official art field, practitioners of Art Brut are by definition not subject to our cultural conventions. They know no rules or norms and the works chosen for this exhibition are in particular marked by a problematic relationship with any kind of frame: in the literal sense of the wooden frame surrounding a composition, the framing defined by the shape of the support, and sometimes a frame drawn or painted by the artist; but figuratively as well, in the sense of the “framework” as the sum total of art’s representational conventions. In most cases the concept of an orthogonal boundary is shattered. Some artists resort to such unorthodox supports as salvaged materials, torn paper, bits of cardboard, paper handkerchiefs and cloth serviettes. To reject imposed frame(work)s is to resist acculturation; and this is what Art Brut is all about.

see: www.artbrut.ch/exhibition/pathologie-du-cadre

On this inspirational occasion the De Stadshof Collection highlights special frames in it’s own collection: collectiedestadshof.nl/art-brut-frame-work/