IMAGINER… – A Language Beyond the Canon
Exhibition Review
“IMAGINER… Art brut from the collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice” is a focused exhibition devoted to an art whose primary sources lie in personal experience and freely shaped imagination. The juxtaposition of works by Jean Louis Cerisier and Adam Nidzgorski does not attempt to provide a representative overview of art brut. Rather, it explores the different ways in which an individual artistic language can be developed beyond established models and expectations.
The starting point of the exhibition is the concept of art brut, introduced by Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the official art world, academic institutions, the art market and established aesthetic canons. From this perspective, what matters most is not affiliation with a particular style, but the inner need to create, independence and the personal character of the artistic statement. The exhibition allows these principles to be considered not as a closed definition, but as a point of reference for very different artistic approaches.
Cerisier’s work centres on the transformation of reality through individual imagination. Recognisable motifs are subjected to simplification and deformation, so that the image does not so much describe the world as construct a personal version of it. In Nidzgorski’s work, gesture, drawing and expression become more prominent. His works construct their own reality out of figures, signs and situations in which humour can coexist with poetic ambiguity. What connects the two approaches above all is the freedom with which form is explored.
At a formal level, the exhibition also reveals a broad range of means through which the artists shape their artistic statements. Alongside works based on drawing, a restricted tonal scale and expressive line, there are compositions characterised by intense, saturated colour. Colour does not appear here merely as an element that organises the image. In combination with form, line and surface, it becomes a means of shaping the emotional character of the work and asserting its individual tone. More monochromatic works, in turn, direct attention towards the structure of the drawing itself, the gesture and the trace left by the tool.
It is also significant that the exhibition leaves room for the differences between the two artistic approaches. Cerisier and Nidzgorski do not employ a single shared language, nor do their works need to be subordinated to one definition or aesthetic. It is precisely within this diversity that the meaning of the exhibition emerges: art brut can encompass highly varied practices, provided that they retain their independence and personal character.
Bringing these two artists together makes it possible to view art brut not as a single style or recognisable set of formal devices, but as a field of artistic practice grounded in freedom, intuition and individual experience. “IMAGINER…” also reminds us that the strength of this art does not lie in rejecting all rules simply as an act of rebellion, but in the possibility of creating one’s own language beyond what has already been accepted as proper, valuable or artistic.
Jean Louis Cerisier, Adam Nidzgorski
IMAGINER… – A Language Beyond the Canon
1 July–31 August 2026
Exhibition opening: 1 July 2026, 17:00
From the collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice
Property of the Lublin Theater Therapy Foundation. All rights reserved.
Realized with financial support from the City of Lublin