Christian Berst Gallery and Matali Crasset Explore Heterotopia Through Art Brut

A year after co-organizing the Brut Now exhibition in Bourogne, Franche-Comté, gallerist Christian Berst collaborates with industrial designer Matali Crasset on an exhibition that merges Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia with art brut. The show presents over forty drawings by known and lesser-known art brut artists, focusing on repetition and the creation of "absolutely other spaces" (Foucault) — parallel worlds where children reign beyond adult control. Featured artists include Austrian Oswald Tschirtner, whose longilinear motifs in "Bridge" create a rhythmic, gridded new space; Nancy-based Didier Amblard, whose untitled 2012 work constructs a new building reminiscent of the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, built outside his hospital workshop; José Johann Seinen, whose 1995 untitled piece incorporates signs evoking Egyptian mural paintings; and Albert Moser, whose photographic panoramas map not reality but a mental world between the real and imaginary. The exhibition draws on Foucault's 1967 lecture at the Cercle d'études architecturales, which described "heterotopias of compensation" — utopian spaces as perfect and meticulously arranged as our own is disordered. The pairing of art brut with Foucault's "other spaces" offers a fresh lens on the concept.