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.