Jest, Jokes, Frippery

Starting from the life of Charles Adrien Wettach, an outsider who became the legendary clown Grock (2020 marks his 140th birthday), this exhibition takes you into a bizarre world oscillating between the magic of the circus and the ambivalence of the grotesque, between wonder and irritation, laughter and thought, admiration and trepidation.

Who is the real person behind the face of a clown? Why does someone like Grock or Roy Bosier (who lived next to the Musée Visionnaire for many years) take on all these roles to make their audience laugh, dream, marvel? What fantasies are behind the amazing, yet almost unknown objects that Dimitri created from waste material? What jest and jokes do we make ourselves, what frippery or alter egos do we engage in? Do we at all? And if yes, why and to which end? Such are the questions on which the exhibition focuses. The exhibition features legendary (clown) works by Camille Bombois, light objects by Pirkko Fleig who breathes new life into waste material and other frippery, as well as objects – no less bizarre – by Kirila Fäh. Kirila Fäh uses the legacies of nature to turn porcelain heads into Medusas and other mythical creatures. Blurring the boundaries between the absurd and the credible, her work presents a multi-layered poetics of difference.