Lucienne Peiry


Lucienne Peiry, born in Lausanne on 4 September 1961, holds a doctorate in the history of art; she is a specialist in Outsider Art, an exhibition curator, a lecturer and the author of several publications. She gives lectures in both Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, and has been teaching Outsider Art at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne since 2010. Since 2016, she has also been teaching at the University of Lausanne

Biography

Brought up in the canton of Fribourg, in 1996 Lucienne Peiry was the first woman to obtain a Phd in the History of Art in Lausanne. Her thesis was the first to be devoted to "Art Brut" and to the history of the collection that Jean Dubuffet instigated. It was initially published by Flammarion as "L'Art Brut," ; an enlarged and updated version by Flammarion appeared in 2016.
Formerly, Lucienne Peiry was a journalist with Radio suisse romande and, at the same time, a freelance exhibition curator. In 2001, she took over the direction of Lausanne's Collection de l'art brut from. In that position, she set up a number of temporary exhibitions and added to the museum's holdings by discovering Outsider Art creators in Switzerland and in various other countries of Europe, as well as in notably India, Japan, China, Benin and Bali.
The author of several works and articles on Outsider Art, Lucienne Peiry has also directed numerous publications and exhibition catalogues for the museum, including the cult book "Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne," published by Flammarion-Skira of Paris in 2012.
Lucienne Peiry has encouraged the museum to produce or coproduce several documentaries on Outsider Art creators. In 2001 she launched a teaching program for the Collection de l'Art Brut, which she continued to develop.
In 2003, she organized an exhibition on Louis Soutter, jointly with the Basel Museum of Art and the Cantonal Museum of Fine Art Lausanne. Christian Zacharias, director of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra participated in the project. She set up various partnerships with other Swiss cultural institutions, including the Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne, the Museum of Art and History in Fribourg, and Lausanne's Petit Théâtre.
Appointed Director of Research and International Relations for the Collection de l'Art Brut in 2012, Lucienne Peiry gave up her position as museum director. She is now in charge of promoting the Lausanne museum abroad and of seeking out new Outsider Art creators throughout the world. She encourages studies on the creators she discovers, and on behalf of new publications and documentary films. She also lends advice to students and researchers, being called upon as an expert for works on Outsider Art at various universities in Switzerland and abroad.
Since 2012, she has also kept up a monthly artistic contribution for the RTS broadcasting company, on behalf of their "A vous de jouer" program on Espace 2.
Lucienne Peiry curated an exhibition on the encyclopedic art work of at Neuchâtel's Centre Dürrenmatt in 2014, and again at Lugano's Museo cantonale d'Arte in 2016. Two trilingual exhibition catalogues were published for the two events.
In 2017 she curated the show "Inextricabilia, Enchevêtrements magiques" at the maison rouge in Paris: in addition to the show's catalogue, many articles and newspaper accounts appeared, together with a major analysis by the art historian Valérie Arconati in the French daily newspaper Libération. Later she curates an which gathers around 80 drawings shown for the first time to the public, and also the exhibition ", where she creates a dialogue between art and science with rhinoceroses painted and drawn by Gaston Dufour and real stuffed rhinoceroses.
Lucienne Peiry holds a website called .

Publications