Jean Dubuffet’s career is marked by his particular inventiveness and willingness to revisit and reinvestigate prior modes of creation and composition. A prolific artist whose oeuvre spans nearly all media and styles, Dubuffet’s finest works form a bridge to their predecessors while clearly laying a foundation for their followers. Femme aux Vêtements Laineux from 1954 is a superb painting on paper, which clearly exposes many of the themes and material complications with which Dubuffet was working at the time.

Beginning in December 1953, Dubuffet began a series of works that were compositions made of lithographic prints, cut and pasted together. These Assemblages d’Empreintes were themselves mutations of his portraits and landscapes made of collaged butterfly wings, which had come to fruition earlier that year. Dubuffet regarded the body and landscape as inextricably linked. His most successful iterations of both subjects incorporate the visual language of one with the other – the body as a landscape and the landscape as living beast. Femme aux Vêtements Laineux melds these two fascinations into one figure, expressing a particular tactility and surface quality that belies the flatness of the paint used in its execution. Dubuffet discovered a specific surface effect in Femme aux Vêtements Laineux that he first explored in his celebrated Sols et Terrains series from earlier in the decade. Achieved with thick impasto of an almost mortar-like paint, Dubuffet was then able to recreate this energized physicality with only paint and paper. Such an elegant form as Femme aux Vêtements Laineux can clearly be recognized as a precedent for the wonderful, and wonderfully playful, series of small sculptures he would execute shortly afterwards.

The immediacy of everyday experience was at the heart of Dubuffet’s fascination with art brut - the intuitive, unfettered and instinctive visual language that Dubuffet previously sought out in tribal cultures, mental institutions and children’s art. His quixotic figures are indicative of this tendency: Femme aux Vêtements Laineux harkens back to these rudimentary structures while establishing a new mode of expression – and done so exceptionally that is was included in his seminal retrospective in 1960.