NEUSS.- "There’s no art without drunkenness," remarked Jean Dubuffet about his art, in which both the materials and the styles are subject to constant change. The son of a wine dealer, already after gaining his school leaving certificate he started studying painting, but then found his way into his father’s vocation. Only in 1942, at the age of 41, did he turn thoroughly to art and become one of the most important stimuli for art in the twentieth century.The images of street art much scorned at that time—graffiti and scrawlings on pissoirs and the walls of houses—found their way to a new aesthetics in Dubuffet’s works, an aesthetics which has changed general perceptions. The subjects of his paintings—people or a landscape—are continually in motion, just as the materials used are, such as limestone, sand, tar and coal-dust. Nevertheless, no matter how raw and coarse the materials appear to be, and no matter how brutally and awfully some of them have been scratched, it is the highest form of aesthetics and the starting point for the intermeshing of high and low culture so widespread today.

The art exhibition house of the Langen Foundation is now dedicating a solo exhibition to this artist who is regarded as a forerunner and advocate of the representation of everyday reality. Around fifty works, including seldom shown works from the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection, provide a comprehensive overview of the entire oeuvre.The prelude is made with works from the 1940s when the artist was discovering his own language of images. This is followed by the various phases that roughly can be called grotesque, abstract, hourloupe and late work.

With his ironically cheerful imagery, Dubuffet lyricizes the material element, the small, neglected things of everyday life, the simple living of people, animals and nature.Thus, his paintings, in a way completely different from the later pop art artists who admired him, depict what is trivial. His art does not deride what is ordinary, but rather shapes the hidden poetry of everyday things into multifaceted image-compositions with multiple meanings.

The characteristic alternation in Jean Dubuffet’s painting between reality and dream, outer and inner experience, the ambiguity of his subjects corresponds to the position of this highly individual art situated between abstraction and representation.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Kunsthalle of the Munich Hypo Cultural Foundation and will be shown there from 19 June to 30 August 2009.