âEnigme autodidacte

Often celebrated as a kind of genius trained in the "school of life" who managed to produce a singular body of work despite a lack of professional training, the autodidact questions and challenges our conceptions of art.

Entitled The Self-taught Riddle, the new exhibition presented at the MAMC + in Saint-Etienne aims to revisit this idealising vision of the figure of the self-taught artist in the history of contemporary art in an attempt to grasp what actually happens when artists learn by themselves.

The exhibition assembles over 200 works by self-taught artists from a wide range of backgrounds who implement, emblematically, different modes of constructing knowledge autonomously.

It also features the works of a few professional artists who decided to start from scratch and launch themselves into the unknown.

It seeks to identify the intentions, processes and gestures that lead - consciously, intuitively, or unconsciously - to aesthetic innovation and to obtain, sometimes retrospectively, to a prominent place in the history of art. Text in English and French.