Énigme autodidacte ‐ The Self‐taught Riddle

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-Étienne 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.