Art brut encompasses works created spontaneously by self-taught artists, often individuals living on the margins of society or experiencing exclusion, isolation, or mental illness. Their work resists conventional classification while retaining remarkable expressive power, honesty, and individuality. Unconstrained by compositional rules or prevailing aesthetic trends, it constitutes a deeply personal record of experience, emotion, and imagination, revealing a world seen from the perspective of those outside the cultural mainstream.

In Poland, the most important collection of this kind of work is the Art Brut Collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice. The exhibition presents works by two French artists drawn from this collection.

Jean-Louis Cerisier (b. 1957) belongs to the group of French artists described as singulier ("singular" or "distinctive"), whose work defies straightforward classification. His paintings do not seek to reproduce reality but rather to express inner experiences, emotions, and anxieties. His compositions reveal a deeply personal world in which the boundary between imagination and reality becomes blurred. Although Cerisier's visual language shares certain affinities with contemporary art, his work is not the result of a conscious adherence to any particular style. Instead, it emerges from an intuitive creative process, free from academic conventions, bringing it close to the spirit of art brut.

Adam Nidzgorski (1933-2025), the son of Polish emigrants, was born near Paris. After the Second World War, he moved to Poland, where he studied at the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw. He returned to France in 1956 and later settled in Tunisia, where he embarked on his artistic career in 1963. Following his return to Paris, he quickly gained recognition as one of the most compelling representatives of French art brut. From the outset of his career, he was fascinated by art created outside the institutional art world. He corresponded with Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term art brut, and took an active part in discussions on the place of intuitive and self-taught art within contemporary culture. After 1990, he visited Poland on numerous occasions, promoting the idea of art brut while presenting his own work. His expressive compositions, imbued with humour and poetic imagination, stand as a testament to artistic independence and to the conviction that genuine art is born of freedom, intuition, and an authentic need to create.