BRUTALLY REAL
Amongst his many activities, Bruno Ducharme is a collector and a film maker. In 1999, he founded a non profitable organisation named « abcd » which is one of the reasons I don’t forget the name. « Art Brut, Connaissances et Diffusion » He has assembled his collection over more than thirty years. It now comprises 3,500 works by 300 artists from numerous countries and from the mid-1800s to the present day. Some of these works were produced in mental institutions, others in the solitude of our towns and villages. Some are mediumistic works, others are folk objects which escape the conventions of tradition. The collection comes from collecting and research undertaken by pioneering psychiatrists such as Hans Prinzhorn, or artists and writers such as André Breton. Such works were theorised in 1945 by Jean Dubuffet who invented the concept of art brut (“outsider art”). By placing these productions under the umbrella of art, Dubuffet initiated a radical paradigm shift that incites us to r