Waddington Custot is proud to present its 14th solo exhibition of works by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85), a celebration of the gallery’s longstanding relationship with the artist and his Estate, spanning over 50 years since hosting his first British show in 1972. Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years brings together a focused selection of paintings from the radical final chapter of his career. Dubuffet remained remarkably productive right up to the end of his life, creating works that push artistic boundaries and challenge the way we see the world. Presenting 17 pivotal paintings made between 1975 and 1984, the...
Waddington Custot is proud to present its 14th solo exhibition of works by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85), a celebration of the gallery’s longstanding relationship with the artist and his Estate, spanning over 50 years since hosting his first British show in 1972.
Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years brings together a focused selection of paintings from the radical final chapter of his career. Dubuffet remained remarkably productive right up to the end of his life, creating works that push artistic boundaries and challenge the way we see the world. Presenting 17 pivotal paintings made between 1975 and 1984, the exhibition highlights a period of great experimentation. Dubuffet re-examines the visual language developed over four decades, loosening previous structures, exploring new colours and blending abstraction with figuration in ways that are thought-provoking and full of vitality.
A fearless iconoclast, Jean Dubuffet emerged from the devastation of the Second World War with a single determination: to obliterate tradition and remake art on his own terms. He rejected academic polish and conventional beauty, favoring raw, immediate and often confrontational expression. His late paintings concentrate this radicalism to its purest form, creating psychological landscapes that defy literal representation. Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years reveals an artist who never ceased to reinvent himself, pushing Art Brut to new extremes, mining the raw energy of human experience and challenging the very foundations of how we see and feel the world, right up to the final moments of his life.
