Esprits libres encourages us to take a fresh look at unique, authentic, surprising artistic expressions. It is an invitation and a challenge to creativity and the collective imagination, privileging figurative and narrative art with an surrealist bent. The exhibition is based on these expressions’ power to transcend academic strictures and bring all generations together.

No school, no line of theory, no concept is claimed: the exhibition transcribes a free state of mind, an internal rhythm of creation,
a stand taken in the world.
Since 2010, HEY! Modern art & pop culture
has given European visibility to an international community of artists working to defy conventions, redefining the “good” and
“bad taste” of today. An art long regarded
as “alternative”, seldom exhibited but created by thousands of artists throughout the world, off the critical and market radar. Whether their esthetics are based on popular culture or deliberately distanced from academic thought, this heterogeneous grouping is distinguished by its character: narrative, often surreal, and almost always figurative. Its respect for pop culture and rejection of standard formats also shape its direction. The fine arts are not denied, but quoted and sometimes appropriated;
folk, pop, and street arts are reevaluated and revalorized; unique and outsider arts– “instinctive works, in every case deconditioned from the learned” as Alain Bourbonnais described them to Jean Dubuffet1–are brought into the fold.