Is This Really Art Brut? How Someone Else’s Term Made Me Look at My Own Work Differently
An artist reflects on whether her sculptures can be understood as Art Brut, tracing their origins from assemblage, toy blocks, and voxel aesthetics to a deeply personal experience of absence, memory, and the need to create a sense of presence. Through the transformation of a children’s cube into a body and a sculpture, the work explores how material, repetition, and personal experience can shape contemporary art.
Is This Really Art Brut? How Someone Else’s Term Made Me Look at My Own Work Differently One day, an artist who is important to me looked at my sculptures and said, “This is Art Brut.” I was surprised. Not because I disliked the word, and not because I couldn’t see the connection at all. It was simply that I had never thought about my work that way myself. I thought about assemblage, pixel aesthetics, children’s building blocks, modularity. I took small elements and assembled them into figures that looked like people. For me, this was a conscious exploration of form and material. But his words made me wonder: what exactly did he see in my work? At first, I looked for the answer in the sculptures themselves — in their simplicity, repetition, unusual proportions, childlike material, and rejection of academic anatomy. Then I remembered how the series had actually begun. And that was when his words started to make much more sense to me. Where Did These People Come From? At the beginning, there was something slightly voodoo-like about the series. Not in a literal sense, but rather in the feeling that a small figure could become a substitute for someone who was not there. At that time, I had found myself in a new country without my family. My mother and father live somewhere I cannot reach them. And now, I cannot even call them. I did not plan to make a work about this. I simply started creating relatives for myself. If someone is not there, perhaps you can try to make them. Take small cubes, build a body out of them, place it next to you — and the empty space is no longer completely empty. Now I understand that this series really emerged from a traumatic experience, although at the beginning I did not call it that. Could There Be Something of Art Brut in This? The term Art Brut was introduced by Jean Dubuffet in 1945. He was interested in art created outside professional artistic culture, and in an artistic language that did not attempt to imitate existing artistic rules. Such art can involve unusual materials, repetition, simplification, strange proportions, personal systems of imagery, a rejection of academic anatomy, and a childlike or direct logic. If I look at my figures purely visually, certain parallels can indeed be found. They are not constructed according to academic anatomy; the body is made from repeated elements; the proportions can be unusual; and the material itself comes from the world of childhood. There is play, simplification, and a certain naivety of form in the works. Perhaps that is what the artist saw: not simply the cubes or the childlike aesthetics, but something that emerged from an inner necessity. Assemblage, Found Object, Voxel, Toy Art Other concepts are still important to me because each of them describes a different aspect of this work. Assemblage refers to constructing a new object from ready-made elements. Found object refers to an object that already existed before the artist and, in a new context, acquires a different function and meaning. Pixel or voxel aesthetics refer to constructing a larger form from small discrete units. In my case, this logic moves from digital space into physical space: a small ready-made element becomes the unit from which a three-dimensional form is built. Toy Art draws attention to the cultural origin of the material — the children’s toy and its emotional and symbolic context. And Art Brut opens up a different question: where does the artistic need to create come from, and how independent of established artistic models can an artistic language be? None of these concepts fully describes my work. Perhaps that is why I am no longer looking for one correct definition. At the same time, my practice is not unconscious. On the contrary, there is a very clear conscious method behind it. I take a ready-made object, turn it into a module, repeat that module, and use it to build a body. From bodies, characters emerge. So I find it useful to separate two things: where the need to work comes from, and how I actually work. The first is connected to my experience — the absence of loved ones, loneliness, trauma, and the desire to create a sense of presence. The second comes from a conscious choice of material, rules, and form. The Cube as Material The more I think about this series, the less I see the cube as simply a material. It is an object that already had a life of its own. Once, it was a children’s toy; someone held it in their hands, built things with it. Then it ended up among other objects and eventually came to me. Now it serves a completely different function. Toy → material → module → body → sculpture. I am interested precisely in this transformation. The cube was created for play, and I use it to create a person. A children’s object becomes a way of speaking about the human body — and at the same time about a presence that is missing. There is a simple rule in my work: cube = unit. A single cube does not represent a person. But when there are many of t
Is This Really Art Brut? How Someone Else’s Term Made Me Look at My Own Work Differently at Zeppel Inn