Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present hyberDubuffet, an exhibition conceived in close collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Simultaneously held in our two Parisian galleries, the exhibition is a carte blanche to its curator Fabrice Hyber.

Following a joint reflection with director of the Fondation Dubuffet Sophie Webel as well as conversations with curator of the Centre Pompidou Françoise Guichon, Fabrice Hyber proposes to open a dialogue between Jean Dubuffet’s work and his own.

Thanks to several pieces on loan from the Fondation Dubuffet and the kind contribution of private collectors, the HyberDubuffet exhibition features a wide range of major artworks along with more intimate ones from diverse periods of the artists’ respective careers.

I have brought the project of a HyberDubuffet exhibition to the foundation members to stand in contrast with the more and more frequent confrontations of the works of two artists staged by museums and galleries. In some cases, this type of crossed presentations makes sense –especially in regard to history (and we ourselves used this approach for the Chaissac/ Dubuffet exhibition when their correspondence was published)- but most often, it comes down to a mere –sometime very well put up- scenography centered on formal similarities.

The HyberDubuffet project is of another kind. The connections we draw here are not formal (or very rarely) but based on Fabrice Hyber’s intuition that his way to “think art” echoes that of Dubuffet. We gave him carte blanche for the selection of artworks and interfered very little in the matter, except to precise their place in the evolution of Dubuffet’s oeuvre.

Beside, for a foundation like ours, and more than thirty years after the artist’s death, it is crucial to open up to the new generation. While that of researchers and curators already found its way to the rue de Sèvres, inviting an artist to give a fresh look on Dubuffet’s work has always been in our plans.

Since we cannot hold this exhibition within our walls, the magic has happened the other way around and Dubuffet was invited by the artist!

For he who fought against the “suffocating culture”, how not to be enchanted by this dialogue opened with Fabrice Hyber, an equally free-minded and unconventional spirit?