Jean Dubuffet & John Fahey
March 12 – April 18, 2026


Picture Theory is pleased to present an exhibition bringing together works by Jean Dubuffet and John Fahey, two figures who moved fluidly between the visual and sonic realms, opening new ground between music and visual art. Best known respectively as a painter and a pioneering guitarist, both artists treated music and image as parallel fields of experimentation.

Dubuffet, the founder of Art Brut, maintained a deep engagement with music throughout his career, composing experimental works and collaborating with avant-garde musicians. His visual language—rhythmic, improvisational, and resistant to academic tradition—shares affinities with the structures of free and experimental music.

Fahey, widely regarded as a foundational figure of American primitive guitar, similarly approached music with a visual sensibility. Alongside his recordings and performances, he produced drawings and paintings that echo the improvisational spirit of his compositions. His practice reflects a porous boundary between sound and image, where mark-making and musical phrasing emerge from the same exploratory impulse.

Bringing Dubuffet and Fahey into dialogue highlights a long tradition of artists who move between disciplines—musicians who draw, painters who compose—treating artistic practice not as a single medium but as an evolving field of rhythm, gesture, and intuition.

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) was a French painter, sculptor, writer, and theorist best known for founding the concept of Art Brut, a term he used to describe the raw, untrained creativity of artists working outside academic and cultural institutions. Rejecting traditional ideals of refinement and beauty, Dubuffet developed a deliberately rough visual language marked by thick surfaces, unconventional materials, and childlike mark-making. His practice continually challenged hierarchies between high and low culture and between trained and instinctive expression. In the 1960s, he
also produced experimental musical recordings and performances, extending his interest in improvisation, texture, and anti-academic expression into sound as well as image.


Avant-garde guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) incorporated influences ranging from folk, blues and bluegrass to classical music, musique concrete, and noise in his primarily acoustic guitar-based compositions. Considered a legend by many, Fahey released upward of three dozen LPs in his lifetime. Relatively late in life, Fahey extended his so-called American Primitive approach beyond music, and into the creation of a substantial body of paintings. Working on found poster board and discarded spiral notebook paper, in tempera, acrylic, spray paint, and magic marker, Fahey’s intuitive approach echoes the action painters and Abstract Expressionists. His painting studio floated from motel bed to motel bed and eventually ended up in his home in Salem, Oregon. The same alluring and tranquilizing aesthetics that define much of Fahey’s musical output are equally present in his paintings.”