Jean Dubuffet

The electrifying final decade of Jean Dubuffet’s career.

Waddington Custot is proud to present its 14th solo exhibition of works by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85), a celebration of the gallery’s longstanding relationship with the artist and his Estate, spanning over 50 years since hosting his first British show in 1972.

‘Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years’ brings together a focused selection of paintings from the radical final chapter of his career. Dubuffet remained remarkably productive right up to the end of his life, creating works that push artistic boundaries and challenge the way we see the world. Presenting 17 pivotal paintings made between 1975 and 1984, the exhibition highlights a period of great experimentation. Dubuffet re-examines the visual language developed over four decades, loosening previous structures, exploring new colours and blending abstraction with figuration in ways that are thought-provoking and full of vitality.

The earliest paintings on display, ‘Paysage avec 6 personnages’ and ‘Paysage avec 4 personnages’, both from 1975, depict figures embedded within abstracted landscapes, the perennial theme of Dubuffet’s long career. Beneath a high horizon line, terrain is painted as layered bands of form and colour, the figures immersed in and at one with the soil. These paintings are notable for their vibrant and explosive use of yellow and pink, colours largely absent during the previous series L’Hourloupe (1963–74), when white and black, blue and red dominated. Dubuffet’s vocabulary begins to loosen: landscapes and figures coexist in fluid systems.

Four collage pieces from the Théâtre de la Mémoire series (mid-late 1970s) find Dubuffet revisiting earlier motifs; painted onto pieces of paper, cut and assembled into layered compositions, characters float in untethered landscapes, the separation between figure and background  seemingly interchangeable. The highlight is ‘Le Malentendu’ (23 December 1976), a masterpiece of layered colour, fragmentary forms and temporal freedom. 

Next, we show four paintings from Dubuffet’s Partitions series (1980–81), the last major series painted directly onto canvas. Harking back to paintings from the early 50’s, the field patterns of the earlier works are replaced here with simple outline boxes, each containing one or more figures, seemingly caught within the terrain within which they exist, reinforcing the bond between the body and the earth.

Dubuffet’s Sites and Psycho-sites series (1981–82), represented by four paintings, transport viewers into imagined, indeterminate spaces. Figures float through elusive landscapes coloured in expressive palettes. Dubuffet described these works as representing “ideas of characters who populate ideas of sites… an enterprise aimed at escaping the reasonable, at freeing the figuration and hence the vision.” In ‘Site aléatoire avec 6 personnages’ (5 May 1982), he blurs the line between figure and landscape to such an extent that figures fuse with ground, hovering ghost-like on the verge of disappearance. At the threshold of abstraction, they form a meditation on presence, absence and our connection to the earth.

In two rare, large works from the Mires series (1983), Dubuffet experiments with immersive colour fields, collapsing space and time in abstract compositions where line, volume, void and colour intermingle. The bright yellow ‘Mire G 136 (Kowloon)’ evokes Dubuffet’s imagined impressions of Chinese shop signs and ceremonial banners in Hong Kong. ‘Mire (Boléro)’, a deep, resonant red, depicts a fragmented pictorial space and hums with latent heat. These paintings, fully abstract, the figures entirely dissolved, buzz with an almost atomic energy. Dubuffet seems to be reducing the world to an elemental level, capturing a sense of intensity and unstoppable motion.

‘The Last 10 Years’ concludes with ‘Champ Psychophysique’ from 1984, part of Dubuffet’s Non-lieux series. It represents a psychophysical field, merging perception, sensation and material reality, evoking cycles of emergence, presence and disappearance. The work reflects Dubuffet’s interest in terroir and our inseparable bond with the land – his last meditation on how humans emerge from, inhabit and eventually reabsorb into their environment.

A fearless iconoclast, Jean Dubuffet emerged from the devastation of the Second World War with a single determination: to obliterate tradition and remake art on his own terms. He rejected academic polish and conventional beauty, favoring raw, immediate and often confrontational expression. His late paintings concentrate this radicalism to its purest form, creating psychological landscapes that defy literal representation. ‘Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years’ reveals an artist who never ceased to reinvent himself, pushing Art Brut to new extremes, mining the raw energy of human experience and challenging the very foundations of how we see and feel the world, right up to the final moments of his life.

‘Jean Dubuffet: The Last 10 Years’ coincides with an exhibition on the same defining years, ‘Pulsions, Jean Dubuffet, the final years (1974-1985)’, at the Fondation Dubuffet, Paris, France, opening on 16 April 2026.