With our kind regards,
The Trinkhall team.
The Trinkhall collection is globally unique and assumes an exceptional artistic and patrimonial interest. Patiently assembled over forty years initially under the Créahm banner, then the MADmusée and now, the Trinkhall, it includes over three thousand pieces – paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures - which were all created in the context of workshops, by vulnerable artists, generally with learning difficulties, mental health conditions or serious psychosocial issues. The works come from all over the world; everywhere in Europe, America and, currently to a lesser extent, Asia and Africa. Since the new gallery opened, a comprehensive and ambitious growth plan guarantees new development, longevity and coherence.
Its recent labelling under the aesthetic categories of art brut or outsider art, gives it a clearer identity and allows for a profoundly fresh outlook. In simple terms, the concept of art brut favoured by former MADmusée management, underplayed the workshop system in order to showcase the formulaic imaginary world of unique creations, independent from their community of origin, refraining from contemplating the specificity and the very identity of the collection and leading to ambiguity and confusion in terms of its nature and the possibilities of its application.
Now that the workshop is no longer “on the table,” but considered as the collection’s common thread, unity and coherence, its policy of conversation, growth and cultivation is both clear and energized. Centred around the workshop – its poetry, history and movements that support the beginning and the future, the conditions of creation that play a part, the meanings it carries, its place in the history of art, its reflection of all genuine interrogation on the “possibility of art,” – the Trinkhall collection constitutes an exceptional investigative instrument, sometimes acting as a contrast, of forms of contemporary artistic expression. The core of the collection was formed in the very early 1980s, on the initiative of Luc Boulangé, founder of the Créahm. In other words, from the beginning, the collection has accompanied the extraordinary movement that he saw throughout the whole world, the creation of workshops for vulnerable people from an exclusively artistic perspective and no longer occupational or therapeutic as the reception and care institutions had been up to that point. From then on, the collection has become the favoured reflection and expression – in all its variety, complexity and historic richness – of this movement which has a recognised importance from an art history point of view and, more generally, in terms of cultural history or a wider socio-historic context with historic anthropological dimensions. Since the 1970s, the “workshop movement,” as it can be perceived and understood today, has provided an entirely renewed response to the question of “outside art” or “art at the border of art,” which, since the end of the 19th Century, literally haunts the creation of modern and contemporary art. With the “workshop movement,” the very idea of a border is being questioned and reorganised, and, in a way, creating disorder for the relationships between here and elsewhere, inside and outside, which, for a long time, have controlled the reception of “outside art” and the aesthetic, social and cultural processes of their “artification.” Other than its intrinsically artistic interest, the Trinkhall collection is the living archive of this movement, the privileged memory and witness of the continued experience for which, it sets the scene throughout the world. It reveals this movement and, finally, enables the possibility of full recognition and in-depth study.
