Dubuffet: The Late Years
October 3, 2011 – January 6, 2012

Vivian Horan and Antoine Helwaser are pleased to present Dubuffet: The Late Years, an exhibition featuring several works from the artistic pioneer Jean Dubuffet. With a career spanning over sixty years, Dubuffet's artistry solidified with each decade as he remained staunchly opposed to the established conventions of art history. This exhibition showcases key examples from the late period of Dubuffet's œuvre with a focus on works produced between 1980 and 1983.

Dubuffet ushered in the decade with his Site aleatoires series in 1980. His use of collage brings attention to the highly exaggerated and distorted figures. Implementing a similar theory in his Psycho-Sites series, which comprise the majority of the exhibition, Dubuffet minimizes his use of collage and works strictly with oils and acrylics. This choice of media allows Dubuffet to give the illusion that his figures drift into the background, highlighting his mission to blend foreground, background and figure to reject higher value given to one element. With the Psycho-Sites, Dubuffet begins deconstructing the accepted portrayal of figurative landscape.

Moving from this progression, Dubuffet wholly removes the figure in his Mire series to better encapsulate the energy and rhetoric of space. Dubuffet's efforts rested on his belief that viewers afford too much value to subject matter and its historical context. He emphatically stated, "I challenge it. I want to take things back to the beginning, to point zero, before the institutionalization of all vocabularies." With this, Dubuffet's Mire works reconcile the artist's dissatisfaction with the long-standing artistic interpretations that were deeply rooted in the canon of art history. Dubuffet masterfully compels his audience to confront the emptiness of the world that would otherwise be ignored. The contrasting primary colors bring the void of space to the forefront. Importantly, the Mire series led Dubuffet to further push the limits of orthodox painting in the final years of his prolific career.


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