French artist, maker of dolls, drawings and sculptures, born in 1947 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency (Val-d’Oise). He lives and works in Paris.
Life
The third of seven children, Michel Nedjar grew up in a Jewish family with Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots: his father, a tailor from Algiers, settled in Paris in 1921, and his mother, of Polish origin, arrived around 1923, fleeing the pogroms. Much of the family perished in the Nazi camps, of which he became painfully aware as a teenager.
Fabric fascinated him very early on: as a child he secretly dressed his sisters’ dolls and helped his grandmother sell rags at the flea market. At fourteen he was apprenticed in a garment workshop. He later travelled in India, Asia and Mexico, where he discovered magic dolls, effigies and mummies dressed in their costumes.
Jean Dubuffet noticed his dolls and brought them into his collection. Nedjar then set about seeking out other creators himself and co-founded the association L’Aracine with Madeleine Lommel and Claire Teller. The donation of this collection in 1999 led to the opening, at the LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, of the first Art Brut museum in France. Thanks to the Daniel Cordier donation, he was also the first Art Brut author to enter the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne.
The work
On returning from his travels he created his first dolls, the “soul flesh” (chairs d’âme): rags, string, plastic bags, feathers, wood, straw or shells, plunged into baths of dye, earth and blood. From 1980 his work extended to wax drawing and painting, on salvaged supports (dyed rags, newspaper, kraft paper, cardboard), as well as statuettes and reliefs in plaster or papier-mâché. Burnt and mutilated bodies dominate this work.
Exhibitions and collections
- “Inner Worlds Outside”, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2006
- Exhibition of his Purim dolls, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, 2009
- “Introspective”, LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 2017
- “The Beauty of Diversity”, Albertina Modern, Vienna, 2024
- LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; Albertina, Vienna