The French word imaginer means imagination, an indispensable element of artistic creation. The French term art brut, literally meaning "raw art" or "unrefined art", was introduced by Jean Dubuffet, who sought artistic expression untouched by the influence of academic training, the art market, or established aesthetic conventions. In his understanding, it referred to art created outside official culture, arising from an inner need for expression rather than a pursuit of recognition or artistic success.

Art brut encompasses works created spontaneously by self-taught artists, often individuals living on the margins of society or experiencing exclusion, isolation, or mental illness. Their work resists conventional classification while retaining remarkable expressive power, sincerity, and individuality. Unconstrained by compositional rules or prevailing aesthetic trends, it constitutes a deeply personal record of experience, emotion, and imagination, revealing a world seen from the perspective of those existing beyond the cultural mainstream.

In Poland, the most important collection of this kind of work is the Art Brut Collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice. The exhibition presents works by two French artists drawn from this collection.

Jean Louis Cerisier (b. 1957) belongs to the group of French artists described as singulier ("singular", "exceptional"), creators who defy straightforward classification. His paintings are not an attempt to reproduce reality but rather a record of inner experiences, emotions, and anxieties. His compositions reveal a world of personal experience in which the boundary between imagination and reality becomes blurred. Although Cerisier's visual language shows affinities with contemporary art, his work does not result from the conscious pursuit of a particular style. Instead, it emerges through an intuitive creative process, free from academic conventions, making it closely aligned with the spirit of art brut.

Adam Nidzgorski (1933-2025), the son of Polish emigrants, was born near Paris. After the Second World War, he moved to Poland, where he studied at the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw. He returned to France in 1956 and later settled in Tunisia, where he began his artistic career in 1963. After returning to Paris, he quickly gained recognition as one of the most distinctive representatives of French art brut. From the beginning of his artistic practice, he was fascinated by work created outside institutional frameworks. He corresponded with Jean Dubuffet, the originator of the term art brut, actively contributing to discussions on the place of intuitive and self-taught art in contemporary culture. After 1990, he visited Poland on numerous occasions, promoting the idea of art brut while presenting his own work. His expressive compositions, full of humour and poetic imagination, testify to artistic independence and to the belief that genuine art is born of freedom, intuition, and an authentic need to create.