Jean Dubuffet | Figure to Ground

Nahmad Contemporary is pleased to show JEAN DUBUFFET | FIGURE TO GROUND at Art Basel Paris, on view at the Grand Palais from October 23–25, 2026. Accompanied by an original text by Dubuffet scholar Camille Houzé, this focused presentation brings together thirteen paintings made between 1944 and 1980. Spanning the artist’s major series, including Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie, Corps de dames, Paysages du mental, Paris Circus, L’Hourloupe, and Théâtres de mémoire, this selection of works follows Dubuffet’s changing treatment of the human figure and its relationship to the world around it.

Adapted from Camille Houzé, “Jean Dubuffet | Figure to Ground”:

“A painting is not built the way a house is built, according to the architect’s blueprints,” Jean Dubuffet wrote in 1945. “You turn your face away from the outcome, you grope your way backwards!” For him, painting was not an execution of a predetermined plan but an adventure guided by materials and surface. Rejecting the conventions of Western culture, he urged artists to begin with the raw material before them and allow the work to emerge through the process of making. “Look at your palette and rags,” he instructed. “There you’ll find clues you’re hunting for.”

Dubuffet was in his mid-forties when, after several unsuccessful attempts at becoming an artist, he left his wine business to devote himself to painting. He rejected perspective and the notion of “good form,” seeking instead to reveal the expressive potential of raw matter and subjects deemed unworthy of artistic attention.

Grand nu charbonneux (1944) debuted at Dubuffet’s first solo exhibition, held at Galerie René Drouin in October 1944. The show drew public protest, while the painting’s stark treatment of the female nude announced the artist’s break with academic conventions. In Restaurant Rougeot II (1961), part of the Paris Circus series, individual figures merge into the activity of a crowded Montparnasse dining room. Two years later, in Être et paraître (1963), figure and ground form a continuous field of cellular shapes, with neither clearly separable from the other. Les intrusions (1978), from the Théâtres de mémoire, assembles fragments into a shifting pictorial space.

Together, these works trace Dubuffet’s transformation of the human figure, from an emphatic body to a presence dispersed among patterns and fragments. 

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Jean Dubuffet in Vence, France, 1959. Photograph by John Craven. © Dubuffet Foundation Archives, Paris / © John Craven. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.