lifestyle
The Pompidou opens up to Jean Dubuffet
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The Malaga branch of the Paris contemporary art centre offers a new exhibition focusing on the founder of Art Brut
The new temporary exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Málaga is one of the "pop-up" museum's best yet. More than 80 pieces from the centre's Paris parent's collections take visitors on a journey through the career of a crucial player in the evolution of art in the last half century.
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) is written down in art history books as the founder of the Art Brut movement and the fascinating complexity of his work is visible from the start of the exhibition, which opens with Traveller without a Compass (1952), a painting that gives the whole exhibition its name.
In the middle of the last century the Art Brut movement sought a kind of 'year zero' of creation, a tendency stripped of tradition, outside the debate between figurative art and abstraction, to open a new childlike and reactionary path, rude in appearance but with a sentimental background, whose echo has resounded for decades and whose most notable cultivators in Spain were Antoni Tàpies and Equipo Crónica, as the president of the Centre Pompidou Paris, Serge Lasvignes, pointed out in Malaga on Wednesday.
"What strikes me about Dubuffet is his crazy, utopian desire to create art rejecting all prior cultural heritage. Starting from zero, wanting to work like a child, like a mad man or a prehistoric man. This exhibition shows this desire well," said Lasvignes, of the show that remains in Malaga until 14 October.
