Ricardo Brey is included in the group exhibition Énormément bizarre at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, on view from March 26–June 30, 2025.
Centre Pompidou's press release follows:
On the occasion of the donation of the Jean Chatelus collection to the Centre Pompidou by the Fondation Antoine de Galbert, the Musée National d'Art Moderne presents this exceptional body of work, assembled over a lifetime with passion and curiosity. Bringing together nearly four hundred pieces - sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects - reflecting diverse aesthetics and voices, the exhibition focuses on the poetics of ruin, organic decomposition, the forbidden and the apocalyptic specter that reflect the collector's obsessions.
The presentation of part of his collection at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris for the “Passions Privées” exhibition, followed by “L'Intime, le collectionneur derrière la porte”, the inaugural exhibition at La Maison Rouge in 2004, gave an insight into the breadth of his collection, which was displayed in a dense, heterogeneous and anti-rhetorical arrangement in his apartments.
To pay tribute to this extraordinary vision and reveal the uniqueness of this 20th-century cabinet of curiosities, the “Énormément bizarre” exhibition presents almost the entire donation through an anachronistic approach favoring free associations. Some areas of his home have been reconstructed identically to allow the public to immerse themselves in his world, while others have been restored in a more museum-like fashion, taking into account his vision. The donation, important for its size, historical value and strangeness, borrows the title of its exhibition from the expression used by Wim Delvoye, one of the artists most represented in this ensemble, in a testimonial to his time with the collector.
Jean Chatelus, who died on July 6, 2021 at the age of 82, was born in Lyon, had a degree in history and was a lecturer at the Sorbonne. Over the course of his life, he amassed a unique collection that defied prevailing taste. He called himself an “accumulator” rather than a collector. In his home, works by Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Christian Boltanski, Yayoi Kusama, Michel Journiac, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Joana Vasconcelos and Andres Serrano gradually found their way into the midst of non-Western art and objects from popular traditions. The Surrealist works with which he began his collection left him with a taste for misappropriated objects. These were soon replaced by works of body art, one of the most represented movements in the collection. In addition to the body, the themes of death and the ephemeral nature of life permeate these works. His sharp eye and extreme freedom have led him to surround himself with the work of many outsider artists and “enfants terribles”. At the same time, he has cultivated a keen interest in ethnographic objects from many cultures, notably from sub-Saharan Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, demonstrating a lively curiosity for artifacts of multiple beliefs.
The exhibition, conceived by the Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Annalisa Rimmaudo and Xavier Rey, is accompanied by a documentary directed by Alyssa Verbizh and a catalog co-published by Empire and the foundation.
