FRED STONEHOUSE Born in 1960. U.S.A. Lives and works in Slinger (Wisconsin), United States. Teenager, he trained to become a car mechanic in a technical high school. It is by exercising this profession that he decided to give up everything to move study art. The artist grew up alongside his deaf mother as well as many members of his family: “I have learned to say what I wanted in all sorts of ways so that they could understand me. Sometimes I had to repeat the same thing in four or five ways, using different words, before they understood me.” With a naked simplicity of his messages, always direct and initiating a plot, as well as the convocation of characters and symbols inspired by regional folklore inhabit the whole of his work - the artist is obsessed by the notions of vulnerability and doubt. Fred Stonehouse has been exhibiting since 1984 ; his work is now present in private and public collections (Spencer Art Museum, San Jose Art Museum…). He currently teaches painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin where he graduated in 1982. HEY! presented his work for the first time in France in 2015 (La Halle Saint Pierre museum, Paris). “Folk and outsider art has influenced me tremendously. I am definitely drawn to the beauty and emotional honesty of the untutored hand, I think that outsiders have a way of resolving visual issues and inventing unconventional solutions that I find remarkable.” (Accidental Mysteries)