The exhibition you need to see now.

How many men make a professional breakthrough at the age of 74? Lacking the facts and figures to prove otherwise, we’ll hazard a guess: very few. But of course, that’s not the only way in which the vast majority of people differ from the great Mr Jean Dubuffet, a pioneering artist who is best known for his interest in “art brut” – outsider art, made by the institutionalised and untrained – which he paid homage to in his arresting, deliberately naive paintings, sculptures, artist books and writings from the late 1940s until his death in 1985.

Born in 1901, Mr Dubuffet launched his art career proper rather late. Though he trained as a painter from the age of 17, he took a long break from art to build a small wine business in Paris before launching himself anew as an artist in the period after WWII. Though in his later life, he was troubled by physical ailments including osteoporosis, that didn’t stop him spending the period from 1975–1979 (when he was in his 70s) producing some of the largest, and most monumental paintings of his entire career, the Théâtres de Mémoire series. These overwhelming works, created from collages of numerous smaller paintings, slyly referencing eras in the artist’s own oeuvre, were partly inspired by The Art Of Memory, a 1966 work by Ms Frances Yates, detailing the various methods by which, in pre-literary societies, ancient philosophers committed their enormously long orations to memory. Memory itself was a topic that seemed to fascinate Mr Dubuffet, especially the ways in which it causes the mind to reconfigure visual experience, and in his Théâtres de Mémoire canvases, he played with this notion, putting together his compositions by pinning his paintings to his studio wall with magnets, and painstakingly reconfiguring them until he felt they were exactly right.

Opening this September at London’s Pace gallery, a new exhibition provides a rare opportunity for art enthusiasts to see eight of these impressive, often overwhelming works, which depict fragments of landscapes, architecture and scribbled figures. It’s the first time they’ve been exhibited in London and they will be accompanied by a display of works from the series that followed them, Brefs Exercices d’Ecole Journalière. We thoroughly recommend heading on down to step into the mind of this truly original painter, and perhaps considering his own words on memory and perception, written in a letter of 1976 to Mr Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace gallery, which this year celebrates 50 years since it started to represent Mr Dubuffet:

“We mustn’t confuse the things the eyes apprehend with what results when the mind receives them,” wrote Mr Dubuffet. “The mind totalizes; it recapitulates all fields; it makes them dance together. It shuffles them, exchanges them, everything is astir. It also transforms them, cooks them in its sauces. It favors certain places, abolishes others.”

Théâtres de Mémoire is at Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1S 3ET from 13 September to 21 October

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