Art Brut CUBA – From December 6, 2024 to April 26, 2025

Art Brut CUBA invites us on a new journey to Cuban lands, following in the footsteps of a first exhibition imagined in 1983 for the Collection de l’Art Brut, by its curator Samuel Feijóo (1914-1992), and entitled Art Inventif à Cuba . Writer, poet, editor, ethnologist, self-taught painter and designer, but also advisor to the Ministry of Culture of Cuba, this figure of Cuban cultural life has worn many hats.

This first event, born from Jean Dubuffet’s wish to bring together works by Cuban autodidacts from the collection of his friend Feijóo, presented more than thirty artists from the province of Villa Clara, all of them affiliated with the Signos Group. This group had been founded by Feijóo in the late 1960s, with the aim of promoting Cuban popular culture through its graphic and literary expressions.

But why take an interest in this country once again? Because its insular nature, its history and its territory, long cut off from the world for political and economic reasons, potentially make Cuba a fertile ground for productions made outside of all artistic influences. Nevertheless, and for these same reasons, it is also much more difficult there than elsewhere to deviate from collective norms and claim singularity in artistic matters.

Art Brut CUBA therefore proposes to return, forty-one years later, to this event by bringing together a selection of drawings and paintings by these historic creators, alongside works by contemporary Art Brut artists, promoted by the Riera Studio in Havana, and presented for the first time at the Art Brut Collection. This time, 266 works – drawings, paintings, collages, assemblages and adornments – as well as photographs are exhibited.

If recycling or diverting makeshift supports or discarded objects for creative purposes is one of the characteristics specific to Art Brut, it is evident in Cuba even more than elsewhere, because the artists in question here lack almost everything. But their overflowing imagination, their ingenuity and their need to create allow them to exploit, transform and divert materials of all kinds, in order to produce singular works of great expressive force.

Through the themes represented, the creators gathered here echo their experiences, the economic, social or political realities of their country, their inner worlds or their obsessions, and reveal to us a facet very far removed from the Cuban imagery usually conveyed, and which still remains mainly controlled by the State.

Commissioner:

Sarah Lombardi, director of the Art Brut Collection