Exhibitions

The Henry Moore Institute has borrowed from the collections of the Fondation Dubuffet in Paris to present the only British exhibition in the centenary year of the artist’s birth.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) became well-known in post-war France for his promotion of art brut, his collection of ‘outsider art’, and for work which seemed to return to the very roots of art in its almost primal use of material and the human image.

In contrast to the heavily worked and textured paintings from the immediate post-war decades, the vision on show in the present selection is almost ethereal, and certainly magical. It has been chosen by Dr John Gibson to show the other way in which Dubuffet processed external material in order to create his alternative vision of reality, and marks his move from natural to synthetic materials.

The maquettes are all drawn from the years 1967-1970, and have a uniformity of approach. Some were to be realised as large-scale installations in France and the USA, affording the spectator a unique chance to enter inside this representation of the artist’s mind. Others remained conjectural, and the range of maquettes on show in Leeds includes both realised and unrealised projects. The maquettes are remarkably similar in feel and material to the finished works, but change the viewer’s position from tiny participant to gigantic onlooker.

Dubuffet’s projects are early examples of now fashionable ‘habitable’ sculptures. As such, they represent a link between Close Encounters, the concurrent exhibition in the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute, and the contemporary dominance of ‘installation art’. John Gibson’s essay - Enchanted Monuments: Inside and Outside Jean Dubuffet - extends this parallel by examining Dubuffet’s perception of the artist and his material environment.