Art Brut | The Collection
The theatre is the central theme of this fourth volume in our series titled “Art Brut – The Collection,” published to coincide with the fourth Art Brut Biennale. After exploring architecture, vehicles, and bodies, attention turns to the theatre, a theme that is developed in its various aspects. The simplest example is the depiction of theatrical architecture, as in the work of Eugen Gabritschevsky or Victorien Sardou. Other artists create works that are intimately connected to the world of theatre, however without necessarily being a part of it. For example, for Giovanni Battista Podestà or Vahan Poladian, a public stage is a place where they put on a “performance” that responds to a society that consigns them to its margins. Their—intrinsically ephemeral—approach uses clothing or accessories as a means of communication and to have their voices or protestations heard. Other artists conceive whole cosmogonies that take the form of a gigantic staging of a fanciful, phantasmagoric world, as in the case of Aloïse Corbaz, whose work is to be viewed as a “Theatre of the universe,” or in that of Marguerite Burnat-Provins, with her graphic work titled Ma Ville.
The book includes over 100 illustrations, many of which published for the first time, carefully chosen to enable the reader to explore the theme of the theatre in Outsider Art, or Art Brut.
Pascale Jeanneret has been curator at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne since 2002. Following Art History and Museum Studies at the École du Louvre in Paris, she was responsible for curating the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s exhibitions. She then worked in the contemporary art field for several years. She has curated numerous thematic and monographic exhibitions for the Collection de l’Art Brut, including Aloïse. The Solar Ricochet, Anna Zemankova, and the Architectures biennale.
Sarah Lombardi has been Director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne since 2013. She is an art historian and graduate of the University of Lausanne and has worked as a freelance exhibition curator. Between 2007 and 2013 she was curator and then acting director at the Collection de l’Art Brut. She has published numerous books in conjunction with the Collection’s exhibitions and has written articles on Art Brut in exhibition catalogues and art journals. In 2013, she launched the Art Brut Biennales, thematic exhibitions curated solely from the museum’s collections as well as a new series of bilingual publications titled Art Brut, la collection – Art Brut, the Collection.
Éric Vautrin has been a playwright at the Vidy-Lausanne Theatre since 2015. From 2007 to 2015 he was a lecturer in Performing Arts at the University of Caen-Normandy and an associate researcher at the CNRS-Thalim laboratory. He also founded and directed the contemporary poetry festival La poésie/nuit in Lyon then Caen from 2005 to 2009. He is currently co-director, along with B. Boisson and L. Fernandez, of the NoTHx (“New Theatres”) research programme on the renewal of European stage forms since 2000. He assists artists creating work at the Vidy-Lausanne Theatre and hosts encounters and debates based on the theatre’s productions.
