A collection of Antoine Bernhart's automatic drawings.
Antoine Bernhart started to produce automatic drawings in the mid 60s and they were published along with
Christian Bernard's writings in 1968 as a book called 'H'. This book drew the attention of Phases which was an international art group created by Edouard Jaguer gathering writers influenced by Lautréamont, some
Surrealist artists and some from the
Lyrical Abstraction movement. Antoine Bernhart became a member of this artistic group as soon as his automatic drawings were published in the Phases magazine (which included collaborators such as Wifredo Lam and
Pierre Soulages).
Papiers hantés is a book compiling recent and older examples of Antoine Bernharts automatic drawings which were exhibited at the
MAMCO (Museum of Modern Art of Geneva) as well at Les Abattoirs (Museum of Modern art of Toulouse).
Antoine Bernhart (born 1950) is a French drawing artist. A member of the neo-surrealist group Phases from 1968, he was excluded a few years later on the grounds that his pornography was too extreme. Antoine Bernhart then moved into alternative spheres to official art and its institutions, and joined a vast network of artists from the counter-culture, particularly the punk movement, producing posters and flyers for psychobilly bands such as the Cramps and The Meteor. He developed a radical, highly idiosyncratic body of work, painting scenes of sexual crime transposed into a theater of abuse and cruelty, obscene and sadistic, grotesque, infernal and ecstatic, defying all prohibitions and conventions, which eventually earned him the paradoxical recognition of gallery owners and major museums.
