Galleries in Paris » BERST

MACHCINSKI – BERST

Galleries — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 14:38:52 +0000

Created in collaboration with the Tomasz Machciński Foundation, the first solo show dedicated to Tomasz Machciński at the Christian Berst Art Brut Gallery features his photographic self-portraits. It covers five decades of his immense artistic practice, which remained private until now. The artist’s entire life has been nurtured by the American dream and fueled by two powerful illusions that have given meaning to his life: the magic of the screen and the perpetual quest for true maternal love.

I made it all because of you wrote Tomasz Machciński in one of the dozens of letters sent to actress Joan Tompkins. A rising star in Hollywood, the actress saw a photograph of Tomasz as a bedridden child in a Red Cross catalog. This catalog listed war orphans available for distant adoption. She then sent a letter to Tomasz with one of her film photos, which she signed With love for Tommy. Joan ‘Mom’ Tompkins. For Tomasz, born in 1942 in a small war-torn Polish village, this began an ambiguous relationship that transcended borders, decades, and social classes.

ESBATI – BERST

Galleries — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:57:55 +0000

The artist Farnood Esbati, born in Tehran in 1993, Asperger’s syndrome was diagnosed in childhood. Today, it’s understood that this characterization, instead of reducing the person to their neurodiversity, actually opens the door to a realm of otherness that remains to be fully explored. Thus, young Farnood, instead of speaking, began drawing and painting on walls. Furthermore, later on, his passion for reading and books, which he continues to avidly collect, greatly enriched his spectrum.

To the extent that it is now evident that his works, much like the literature he continually accumulates, are as refined as they are enigmatic transcriptions of his perception of the world. They serve not only to control the emotions that overwhelm him when he immerses himself in contemplating beings and landscapes. Additionally, Farnood also demonstrates a strong concern for solidarity and unity among people. In short, for harmony. This aspiration is clearly evident in his way of expressing the struggle between the fragment and the whole. Thus, his representations make explicit the outlines and bundles, the omissions, and the underlying flaws that structure his vision.

In fact, whether through peaceful pastoral scenes or convivial tea ceremonies, even through intricate panoramas or tectonic upheavals, Farnood focuses less on tangible elements and more on the currents and undulations that aggregate them. These imperceptible connections, usually unnoticed in ordinary times or perceived differently by each of us, tend to affirm the universe as irreducibly unique.

Because, fundamentally, beyond the blatant similarity between the terms “autistic” and “artistic,” which one cannot help but think about in such cases, doesn’t Farnood’s work further reinforce the idea that all creation would involve absolute solipsism?

His ink drawings on paper, recently discovered by the Iranian artistic community, are thus being unveiled for the very first time to the public through the solo exhibition dedicated to him.

GRIMES – BERST

Galleries — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:18:29 +0000

Ken Grimes, born in 1947, is fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its influence on our world. The exhibition space oddity, organized in collaboration with Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York), features some fifteen exceptional works by this artist.At the age of 24, Ken Grimes experienced a synchronicity and set out to find other similar testimonies. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, his obsessive painting practice, punctuated by textual and visual messages, invites us to relive this experience. From that point on, if he works exclusively in black and white, it’s to disregard the lies of color and achieve a form of truth. His work was featured in 1998 in the major exhibition “Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology” organized by the American Folk Art Museum. He is now part of these collections, as well as those of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

FERREIRA – BERST

Galleries — Wed, 17 May 2023 13:12:53 +0000

Ramiro Sebastián Ferreira Martinez de la Pera, known as “Seba,” born in Asunción (Paraguay) in 1981, is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 15. His early dream of a career as an architect becomes unattainable. Graphic production, which already occupied him as a child, then turns into one of the only bridges between his fertile imagination and a world he mainly experiences from the inside of his room, isolated. More than 400 artworks are thus born, carefully ordered, invisible to others until they are finished. The gallery shows his work in a solo show for the first time.

Following his diagnosis, Sebastián Ferreira’s taste for urban structures takes the sole direction of white paper, which he covers with a synthesis of cities–Buenos Aires, Granada and Cordoba among others, cities he has never visited. Indeed, the Internet is his other privileged bridge with the outside world: he finds there the numerous photographs that feed his creation, as well as magazine pages and postcard images. From this digital collection are drawn the real buildings that Ferreira sometimes includes in his imagined cities, mixing them with numerous urban elements such as roads, traffic lights and buses. These forms polarize a dense, insatiable and generous fascination for urban space – traits that could be echoed in the pronounced filling of the sheet that defines young Seba’s aesthetic.

VICENS – BERST

Galleries — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 13:36:27 +0000

For the second time, the gallery dedicates a monographic exhibition to the work of spanish artist Joaquim Vicens Gironella, showing more than 20 cork sculptures from the 1950s to his death.

In 1948, Joaquim Vicens Gironella (1911-1997) became, after Adolf Wölfli, the second outsider artist to be exposed by André Breton and Jean Dubuffet in the pavilion that Gaston Gallimard provided them in the garden of his publishing house. An enthralled Dubuffet wrote in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue: “This living material, this organic flesh he manipulates – we can hear trees and forests utter through the cork – seem to stir the artist into poetic litanies, even sending him into wild delirium. The movement of his creation is Spanish: a frenzied dance, a brutal veracity, the tragically grotesque, a reverence to ugliness, alongside grave, philosophical eroticism, blood, and death.”

The Catalan cork worker, who exiled himself to Toulouse following Franco’s victory, applied his skills to unfettered creativity.
His intricate cork sculptures and bas-reliefs gave flesh both to the sacred devotion and to the profane sensuousness of his native Catalonia, sometimes fused together in a demonstration of the surprising filiation of Catalonian Romanesque art and Surrealism. As an artist, the way he honored of this tawny cork’s qualities could rival with the most aristocratic of sculptural art. Whether he polished it or preserved its roughness, he was forging a bewitching pact with light.
Behind the perceptible jubilation showed, here and there, the melancholy of exile, the nostalgia of a paradise lost by the one who wrote in a letter to Dubuffet: “I rejected all the lesson”.
Such historical collections are getting scarcer and scarcer, in opposition to outsider art’s ballooning notoriety. It is why, 15 years after the first exhibition we dedicated to him, we are particularly happy to honor his incredible talent with a representative showcase of his work from the 1950s to his death.