HOME

ABOUT

ARTISTS

EXHIBITIONS

GALLERY NEWS

CLIENT SERVICES

CONTACT

LINKS

Michel Nedjar

Michel Nedjar was born near Paris in 1947. Both his Jewish parents had emigrated to France in the early 1920’s, his father from Algeria and his mother from Poland. Nearly all his grandmother’s family were deported during the war and died in concentration camps: his mother and grandmother survived by hiding on a farm in Brittany. His father developed a prosperous business as a master-tailor and Nedjar grew up amid garments and sewing machines, making his first dolls out of cast-off fabrics and tree roots, often playing with them in the cellar. On weekends he would help his grandmother, who ran an vintage clothing stall at the Paris flea market. After leaving school in 1961, he worked as an apprentice tailor for several years. Following a brief period of military service and a bout with tuberculosis, he set forth in 1970 on a series of momentous journeys that took him to Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. By 1975 he had twice visited Mexico, as well as Belize and Guatemala, where the dolls sold in the marketplace fascinated him. “It was my first contact with High Magic, craftsmanship, the Baroque, death”, he later remarked. Back in Paris, he began fashioning his own fetish dolls out of rags, twigs, sacking and other flea market rubbish. At first colourful and comical, the dolls soon became sombre, unkempt and fearsome; some took the form of morbid totems saturated in mud and blood. Later on, he produced low reliefs of massed figures, making more and more conscious allusions to the Holocaust. In 1980 he began to draw, often working by night to produce stacks of images on old envelopes, sheets of sample wallpaper or the back of old record sleeves. He had meanwhile exhibited at the Atelier Jacob in Paris where he was profoundly moved by a display of drawings by the classic Swiss outsider artist, Aloïse Corbaz. Jean Dubuffet, who found his work “horrifyingly tragic”, contacted and encouraged him. Nedjar's dolls are permanently featured in Dubuffet's Collection d'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1982, Nedjar became a co-founder of the L'Aracine Collection of Art Brut.

Over the past two decades, Nedjar has become an internationally-known artist who shows in galleries across Europe and North America and is represented in all major Art Brut collections. For many years, he has also been a keen amateur filmmaker. He continues to travel, returning regularly to Mexico and India. His mature work embodies authority and dignity, as well as being conceived on a large scale. Animal and bird figures, and the human face reduced to an owl-like mask, are constant motifs. Whether in two or three dimensions, his expressions remain true to a fundamental vision of the fragility of human identity, and of the sufferings of the downtrodden and dislocated victims of modern history. His is a disquieting pursuit of human traces, which sometimes insists on the monstrous, and the horrific. At other times, his imagery takes on a transcendent eloquence, manifesting something of the aura-like poise of ancient religious art.

Michel Nedjar featured in latest issue of Raw Vision Magazine:
MY DOLLS SAVED ME
Laurent Danchin raises a few questions about the shamanistic art of Michel Nedjar.
Raw Vision #63 Summer 2008
http://www.rawvision.com/articles/63/nedjar/nedjar.html

Excerpt:
Much has been written about Nedjar since Roger Cardinal's in-depth study published in Lausanne in 1990: of his childhood in a large Jewish family in an idyllic house with a garden in a northern suburb of Paris; of the brutal figure of his father, a Sephardi tailor reminiscent of Kafka's terrible genitor; of his Ashkenazi mother and his Polish, Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who introduced Nedjar to schmattes, the old rags which he later adopted as material for his handmade embryonic dolls. And of his encounter with Téo Hernandez, a Mexican experimental film-maker who became his mentor in the arts; and of their subsequent travels to Morocco, India, Mexico and elsewhere, after which he felt an urgent 'need to work in magic' and hence began his artistic production around May 1976.

One event that dates back to Nedjar's youth is often mentioned also, and is supposed to have been the original trauma that later triggered his creative output: the evening when, at the age of thirteen, he stumbled upon Alain Resnais' movie Nuit et Brouillard on television and discovered the terrifying reality of the Nazi concentration camps. 'I had two aunts who returned from Auschwitz and they told us,' recalls Nedjar. 'But words don't have the power of the image. Resnais' movie really shook me. After the Shoah, that was it: I had left Eden.' And it is a fact that, many years later, Nedjar discovered with amazement that he handled his dolls in the same way that he had seen the soldiers in the film pile up the corpses in the pits when he was a teenager.

Michel Nedjar featured at The Gugging Artists' Gallery Exhibition:
"michel nedjar: animo.!"
31st of May 2008 - 22nd of February 2009
Opening 30th of May 2008 - 7:30 pm
http://www.gugging.org/index.php/en/news

Judy A Saslow Gallery

Outsider Art - Contemporary Art - Folk Art
300 West Superior - Chicago IL 60654
phone 312.943.0530 - fax 312.943.3970
www.jsaslowgallery.com - jsaslow@corecomm.net
Tues-Fri 11-6, Saturday 11-5