Born in Le Havre, France, Jean Dubuffet is considered the founding father of Art Brut.

Rejecting traditional fundamentals of art and institutionalized culture, Dubuffet twice declared to leave the world of art before devoting himself full time in 1942. His interest in works of art produced by people working outside of aesthetic norms, such as children, prisoners and psychiatric patients, became the core of his artistic philosophy, and he remains one of the most controversial post-war French artists in history. Dubuffet’s oeuvre includes paintings, collages, sculptures and monuments.

Retrospectives of his works have been held at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

1974 marked the end of Dubuffet’s highly esteemed ‘Hourloupe’ cycle, a twelve-year project that became the artist’s most formative series. During the last ten years of his life, Dubuffet made a series of works with coloured pencil and felt tip pen on paper. In the artist’s own words, these works were ‘excursions of the mind into no man’s land.’ Expanding his colour palette and revisiting collage techniques from earlier periods in his career, these more intimate drawings embody the artist’s signature structural approaches to colour and form.