Aleksander Lobanov - February 16 through May 27, 2007

The work of Aleksander Lobanov (1924–2003) is that of an almost illiterate man, cut off from the world, a stranger to institutional artistic creation, knowing nothing of drawing, painting, stage setting and photography. It is also the work of a man who had undergone a series of dramatic events in his childhood and youth. By the age of 23, Lobanov had experienced illness (he was deaf and mute as a consequence of meningitis), exile (his birthplace, Mologa, had been swallowed up by an artificial sea), psychiatric confinement, bereavement (he had lost his father), abandonment by his family and emotional deprivation. He is exiled from everywhere, victim of a social, civil and familial exclusion.
He would sublimate his tragedy and succeed in reconstructing his identity through the symbolic route, deploying his own dreamlike mythology and producing several hundred creations that make him the most important Russian creator of Art Brut.
His works, mainly self-portraits, are influenced by the triumphant Soviet ideology. Aleksander Lobanov takes on Stalin’s traits, adopts his posture and his attributes, so that the creator’s portrait is substituted for that of the dictator. He becomes his own icon and is the star of the substitute story he opposes to the silence he has been forced into.
The Collection de l’Art Brut presents the first major retrospective devoted to Aleksander Lobanov.
More than 120 works by Aleksander Lobanov: paintings, drawings, photographs, photomontages and collages drawn for a great part from the Inye Collection in Yaroslavl (Russia), as well as from various public institutions and private collectors. The Collection de l’Art Brut wishes to express its gratitude to Dr Vladimir Gavrilov for his generous donations; it thanks the lenders, especially Dr Vladimir Gavrilov for the works from the Inye Collection in Yaroslavl (Russia), as well as Dominique de Miscault, Alain Escudier, Youlia Karabardina and Sophie Perrelet for their precious contribution.

A bilingual monograph (French/English): Aleksander Pavlovitch Lobanov, auteur d’Art Brut russe, a collective book.
Two short films dedicated to Lobanov, screened continuously.