RAWVISION101 SPRING 2019
EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ASSISTANT EDITOR Mariella Landolfi DESIGN Terrayne Brown PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Aoife Dumphy ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards
COMPRESSORHEAD Frank Barnes’ robot rock band
WALKS TO THE PARADISE GARDEN Excerpts from an important new book
DANIEL GONÇALVES Intricate drawings by self-taught Portuguese artist
RON MANN Paintings by Vietnam veteran
HAFIZ ADEM Sudanese artist’s story of fleeing his country
J.B. MURRAY Decoding Murray’s visionary art
MARK BEYER Beyer’s own interpretation of his mysterious works
SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik
CURZIO DI GIOVANNI A different view of glossy magazine images
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and events
PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com
RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world
FAREWELLS A tribute to Norbert Kox
ISSN 0955-1182
COVER IMAGE: Frank Barnes, Fingers, lead guitarist in Compressorhead robot rock band.
Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) Matrch 2019 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. Periodicals postage paid at South Plainfield, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080, and additional mailing offices.
Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD
WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE
UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD
MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
BEST DESIGN MEDIA AWARD
R AW N E W S
AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRITAIN
DR GUISLAIN MUSEUM
CGP LONDON
Mar 30 – Aug 15
until May 26
until Apr 28
Museum Gugging presents august walla.! textiles, photographs, written word. At Galerie Gugging until May 7, postcards – the small format features postcard artworks by 26 artists. MUSEUM AND GALERIE GUGGING, Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA www.gugging.at, www.galeriegugging.com
Dreamscapecity presents detailed architectural drawings by autistic Dutch artist Tim ter Wal. ÖSTERREICHISCHE GESELLSCHAFT VOM GOLDENEN KREUZE Kärntner Straße 26 (Eingang Marco-dAvianoGasse 1), 1010 Wien, AUSTRIA www.oeggk.at
Sensations. Between Passion and Pain includes work by Johann Garber, Willem van Genk, Marc Lamy and Lies Hutting. MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN Jozef Guislainstraat 43, 9000 Gent, BELGIUM. www.museumdrguislain.be
CGP London, Bethlem Gallery and Outside In have arranged a public exhibition, titled Realm, at CGP London (Southwark Park). The selected artists are Richard Downes, Hazel Brill and Mr X. CGP LONDON, The Gallery, Southwark Park London SE16 2UA, UK www.cgplondon.org www.outsidein.org.uk www.bethlemgallery.com
ART ET MARGES
THE GALLERY OF EVERYTHING
until Jun 23
until Jun 9
until Apr 28
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Art et marges musée takes visitors through the cosmic labyrinths of Serge Delaunay and André Robillard in Intergalactic encounters. ART ET MARGES MUSÉE Rue Haute 314, 1000 Bruxelles, BELGIUM artetmarges.be
ACM
Emma Kunz
Serge Delaunay
WOMEN ART BRUT ARTISTS IN VIENNA
Flying High: Women Artists of Art Brut is a comprehensive show of works by women artists of art brut, in all their diversity, their international relevance, and their historical and contemporary dimensions. BANK AUSTRIA KUNSTFORUM WIEN Freyung 8, 1010 Vienna, AUSTRIA www.kunstforumwien.at 4
Willem van Genk
Tim ter Wal
Mr X
TIM TER WAL
August Walla, photo: Johann Feilacher
GUGGING Apr 25 – Aug 31
STUDIES IN VERBERATION: [ stop || look || listen ] is a visual investigation into the memory of sound, featuring constructions by the seclusive French maker, ACM, alongside performative line drawings by Frankfurt-based draughtsman Julius Bockelt. THE GALLERY OF EVERYTHING 4 Chiltern St, Marylebone, London W1U 7PS, UK www.gallevery.com
R AW N E W S
NETHERLANDS, PORTUGAL, SERBIA, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND
MNMA SERBIA
COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT
May 3 – Jun 14
deadline Apr 25
until Apr 28
City Scapes includes work by artists from three studios for disabled artists: Angel Luis Sastre, Jorge Bermejo and Andrés Fernandez from Debajo del sombrero, Matadero Madrid; Laan Irojojo from Atelier Herenplaats; and Gert van’t Riet from Artism The Hague. GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS Schietbaanstraat 1, 3014 ZT, Rotterdam, THE NETHERLANDS www.herenplaats.nl
Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in Jagodina is inviting artists to participate in the international Triennial of Self-taught Visionary Art. Artists who are interested in participation can submit photographs of three to five works created during last three years, a short biography and an application form either in person, by mail or to trijenalemnmu@gmail.com. Deadline is April 25. www.mnmu.rs/triennials.htm
TREGER SAINT SILVESTRE
Art Brut from Japan, Another Look, curated by Edward M. Gómez, features 24 art brut creators working in Japan today who are being shown in a European museum for the first time. Works include paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures and mixed-media assemblages. COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, SWITZERLAND www.artbrut.ch
AARGAUER KUNSTHAUS
EOA CONFERENCE
Mar 21 – May 12
Momoka Imura
Sava Sekulić
Jorge Bermejo
ATELIER HERENPLAATS
until Apr 28
MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE until Jul 28
Lusofolia “Senseless Beauty” includes works from Centro de Arte da Oliva – Treger / Saint Silvestre Collection and Museu Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva, Lisbon. Visionary Architecture will feature works from the TSS Collection, showing May 14 – June 15 at Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa. NÚCLEO DE ARTE DA OLIVA, OLIVA CREATIVE FACTORY, R. da Fundição, 3700-119 São João da Madeira, PORTUGAL. tsscollection.org 8
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This year’s European Outsider Art Association conference focuses on quality and equality in outsider art. Hosted by Inuti, it will include speeches, exhibitions, workshops, panels, performances, artist presentations, studio visits and sitespecific art. STIFTELSEN INUTI Rålambsvägen 12 112 59 Stockholm SWEDEN. www.inuti.se
Aloïs Wey
Marilena Pelosi
Jens Nilsson, Inuti
Walbaum, photo: Urs Siegenthaler
May 24–26
Aargauer Kunsthaus presents Swiss artists from Collection de l’Art Brut along with works from the holdings of the Aargauer Kunsthaus. The works focus on man, nature, architecture and emblematic imagery. The exhibition is produced by Collection de l’Art Brut Lausanne and realised in cooperation with Aargauer Kunsthaus. AARGAUER KUNSTHAUS, Aargauerplatz, 5001 Aarau, SWITZERLAND www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch
Papagena and Other Odd Fishes features miniature opera-stages by Bernhad Vogelsanger, fantastic costumes and other curiosities created by a variety of artists. MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE Predigerplatz 10, 8001 Zurich, SWITZERLAND museevisionnaire.ch
R AW N E W S
USA
RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY
ANDREW EDLIN
Mar 28 – May 4
until Apr 20
Bodies is an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the Creative Growth studio that depict, engage, and consider the human body. CREATIVE GROWTH ART CENTER 355 24th Street, Oakland, CA 94612 creativegrowth.org
Playing Games: Chance, Skill, and Abstraction features George Widener’s works depicting futuristic games in conjunction with vintage game boards, works of geometric abstraction, and games of chance. From May 9 through June 22, Renaldo Kuhler: Rocaterrania presents the selftaught artist’s imaginary country which he secretly illustrated for more than 60 years. RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY, 529 W. 20th St, New York, NY 10011 www.riccomaresca.com
SLOTIN FOLK ART AUCTION
LAURA CRAIG MCNELLIS AT SHRINE Mar 22 – Apr 20
Joe Coleman
Aurie Ramirez
George Widener
CREATIVE GROWTH Mar 29 – May 1
We Shall Make America Wonder features works by Joe Coleman, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Henry Darger and Duke Riley. ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 www.edlingallery.com
THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY until May 5
Ode to Dolly is an in-depth look at the artwork of Laura Craig McNellis (b. 1957), who was born with severe mental disability and autism and has always remained nonverbal. The exhibition includes some of her earliest creations on folded sheets of newsprint to her more recent tempera paintings depicting clothing with abstract patterning and motifs on cut, shaped paper. SHRINE, 179 East Broadway, New York, NY 10002 shrine.nyc 14
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Slotin Folk Art Auction and Spring Masterpiece Sale presents one thousand lots of some of the best in self-taught art, outsider art, Southern folk pottery, and antique and anonymous folk art. Phone, absentee and online bidding available. 112 E. Shadburn Ave. Buford, Georgia 30518 www.slotinfolkart.com
Gronk
Sam Doyle
Laura Craig McNellis
Apr 27–28
Breadth is curator Jill Moniz’s response to the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art. Featuring works by Sean Dougall, Andrew Paulson, Yrneh Gabon, Gronk and Marisela Norte. THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY 945 Chung Kind Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012 www.thegoodluckgallery.com
COMPRESSORHEAD With no training in electronics or music, artist Frank Barnes has created a successful rock band made up entirely of robots SHEENA MALONE
Compressorhead playing a solo show in Trondheim, Norway in 2017, left to right: Fingers, Frank Barnes (background), Wattson, HellgĂĽ Tarr, Stickboy all photos: NVB
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Fingers, guitarist
Hellgå Tarr, second guitarist
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flanked by two robot pole dancers. Stickboy was the creator’s tenth robot. Previously, there had been the boxer “JP” (“Johnny Pneumatic”), a skeletal head, arms and torso who tried his hand at drumming, painting, dancing and smoking before realising that his talents lay in the bouncer profession (positioned by the door in bars and clubs, he would punch people as they entered). Other early creations included: “The Headless Batsman”, a baseball bat swinging robot; the “Topless Dancer”, a pair of dancing legs; and “Tutti Frutti”, a sometimes-incontinent, swinging-trapeze monkey. This talent for mixing robotics with showmanship, playfulness and humour brought his work to the attention of Swiss artist and Alien-designer HR Giger, and led to them “having tea and playing with robots” in Giger’s front room. Barnes is entirely self-taught with no formal education in the field of mechanics or engineering. He moved to Berlin in the early 1990s as part of a punk band. It was a time of great change and chaos in the city, as the infrastructure of the former East had to mesh with that of West Germany and its higher standards. Suddenly, the equipment in hospitals, offices and factories was rendered obsolete and in need of updating; and vehicles, now subject to more rigorous scrutiny, were being declared unroadworthy and abandoned on roadsides. Barnes found himself in a city with a punky, DIY attitude, where a wealth of free material could be found to foster the experimental beginnings of his practice. He also found inspiration in the raves and parties of music and arts collectives, such as the Mutoid Waste Company and Spiral Tribe. He was staying around Potsdamer Platz, the public square which at the time was a wasteland at odds with the neon, polished cinemas, eateries and hotels that have since sprung up there. Back then, this no-man’s
ravelling west from Berlin’s bustling central area of Mitte, across the river Havel, takes me to Spandau, a borough known for its waterways and charming old town. The directions I’ve been given lead me down a sleepy side street to a large, white architectural box, the exterior of which gives away few secrets. Inside, an unexpectedly large space is revealed, packed with offices, hi-tech machines, work benches, spare parts and flight cases. It’s not exactly an MTV crib, but it is the home of Compressorhead – the band I have come to meet, just before their lead singer, “Mega Wattson”, heads off to Rotterdam’s Tec Art Festival for Creative Technology. The band – Mega Wattson included – is comprised entirely of robots. Compressorhead came to international attention in 2013 when their line-up was “Stickboy” on drums, “Schmidi” on hi-hat, “Bones” on bass and “Fingers” on guitar. A simple smartphone video featuring their cover of Motörhead’s Ace of Spades went viral. Bands and their marketeers strive for such an online reaction – this spontaneous, uncalculated instance points to something intrinsic in the robot band, something that struck a chord with people. Judging from Compressorhead’s enduring popularity, it still does. The band is the project of Berlin-based artists Frank Barnes and Markus Kolb, and electronics engineer Stock Plum, with some help from another, Sydney-based, engineer called Miles van Dorssen. It has taken the best part of a decade to get to the band’s current six-member line-up. Since 2013’s Ace of Spades video, a second guitarist, “Hellgå Tarr”, and singer, Mega Wattson, have been added, creating a fuller and more complex sound. Compressorhead’s origins date back to 2007 with Barnes’s creation of Stickboy, the four-armed and twolegged drummer, who in the early days performed
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Mega Wattson, singer
land contained a sculpture garden made from military waste scraps: jet fighters, a painted tank called “The Pink Panzer” and robot statues. Barnes found he had an affinity with the artists working in the square and collaborated with them on a New Year’s Eve show for Tacheles, the legendary Berlin squat. For a few years, he continued in this vein, organising underground parties and other events, but gradually he became interested in creating his own show. He started to create sculptures, which he then made move. Around the time that he created Stickboy, Barnes was chatting
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with fellow artist Markus Kolb and together they decided to make a robot band. Kolb built Fingers, while Barnes and Van Dorssen started to brainstorm the idea of bass player Bones. By 2013, they were performance ready. Viral success and covers of classics by the Ramones, Motörhead, Pantera and AC/DC led to huge interest. Requests for a tour flooded in for what Barnes calls “the most expensive covers band in the world”. Compressorhead gave their first live performance at the Big Day Out festival in Australia that year. They were dubbed “the
Compressorhead playing a solo show in Berlin, Germany in 2017, left to right: Fingers, Bones, Wattson, Stickboy, Hellgå Tarr
Not many bands have to negotiate the problems that come with transporting members weighing three tonnes world’s heaviest metal band” – after all, not many bands have to negotiate the problems that come with transporting members that weigh three tonnes. Except for “Junior”, who is a little shorter in stature, the robots are built to almost-human scale and created from a combination of scrap metal and custom-built fittings, controlled by electro-pneumatics and enabled by MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface] signals. One advantage of building a musician from scratch is that the features required for the specific tasks can be enhanced and modified accordingly. Hence, Compressorhead has a custom-made drummer with four arms and two legs, and a guitarist with 78 fingertips that are designed to move up and down the fretboard with a virtuosity that would take a human
counterpart years of practice (and much-calloused fingers) to achieve. After establishing a following, the next challenge was to move away from covers and create music that had been specifically written for Compressorhead. Barnes approached John Wright of Canadian punk band NoMeansNo and The Hanson Brothers and asked him to become the group’s musical director. Along with YouTube releases, the project resulted in the 2017 album Party Machine, a mixture of covers and original material, with singer Mega Wattson voiced by Wright. The team behind Compressorhead are as attentive as record company Svengalis who carefully manufacture the image of their bands – but without the worry that overworked members will destroy their
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WALKS TO THE
PARADISE GARDEN A rediscovered manuscript by Jonathan Williams finally appears in book form, recording richly atmospheric journeys through the American South, where the talents of many notable outsider artists were nurtured. Here, Raw Vision publishes exclusive excerpts Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey is a new book of historical importance in the outsider art field, the insights of which will help deepen our understanding of the social-cultural environment from which many remarkable creations by self-taught artists of the American South have emerged. Produced by non-profit arts centre Institute 193, in Lexington, Kentucky, this book was written by Jonathan Williams and features photographs by Roger Manley and Guy Mendes. In its preface, the book’s editor, Phillip March Jones, writes: “Walks to the Paradise Garden sat in a box for over twenty years before Mendes pulled it down from a shelf in his studio and said to me, “We should publish this someday.” Six years later, I began retyping the document and searching, with Mendes’ help, for its corresponding images, our only guide being Williams’ original manuscript and an annotated document titled “An approximate table of contents for Walks to the Paradise Garden.” [...] I called Manley, and he began searching through his corresponding archive, too.”
The book that Williams, Mendes and Manley sought to publish in 1992 was both ahead of and firmly grounded in its time. In it, there were plenty of jokes about the Reagans and former US Vice President Dan Quayle, reviews of the latest food and fashion trends, and visits with artists who were, at the time, still living. Most of these details have survived the editing process, but the artists have not. Fortunately, many of the artists’ works that Williams described have been preserved by museums, foundations and universities that have recognised their value. Walks to the Paradise Garden is not an art-historical text in the traditional sense, and Williams’ writing veers off often and urgently into his own tastes and preoccupations. Opinions abound: he reviews barbecue restaurants, drops names, gives creative directions to artists’ homes, espouses his own political leanings, and makes plenty of overt references to the male anatomy. This is not a condemnation but rather a warning to those without a sense of humour – this book might not be for you.
The following excerpts include original chapter headings and appear in Williams’ American English, complete with his stylistic irregularities.
above: Clyde Jones, Bynum, NC, 1988–1989 opposite: Clyde Jones, Haw River Crossing, Bynum, NC, 1988–1989 photos: Roger Manley
“JUNGLE BOY” JONES’ HAW RIVER ANIMAL CROSSING AT BYNUM Clyde Jones is a retired logger, about fifty years of age, batchin’ it in the pleasantly moribund village of Bynum, down by the River Haw, in Chatham County, North Carolina. Most of “downtown” Bynum has fallen down. Clyde offered me a tubular chair in his front parlor and it too collapsed. Roger Manley thought I’d gone through the floor. No harm done. Walking through his yard of both homemade and humongous animals, Clyde offered one or two observations: “These things are as wild on the outside as I am on the inside,” and “I made all this up, I’ve got a head full of ideas.” I allowed: “Clyde, I’ll bet the neighbors are sure glad these things don’t move at
night.” “There’s something to that,” Clyde allowed back. “What will you do when you’ve used up all the wood and trees there are in Chatham County?” “Move to another county!”
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above: Sam Doyle, St. Helena Island, SC, 1986, photo: Roger Manley
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above: Sam Doyle’s Yard, St. Helena Island, SC, 1986, photo: Roger Manley
THOMAS SAMUEL DOYLE, THE ICONOGRAPHER OF ST. HELENA ISLAND [W]e went to Frogmore [on St. Helena Island] to visit with Uncle Sam Doyle, who is another kettle of fish. Sam was sitting out under the trees in the yard next to his little house. The yard was filled with sculptures and paintings, his Outdoor World-Wide-International Gallery. The small sculptures were made from roots and found objects, usually covered with tar and then painted: chickens, snakes, turtles, lizards, dogs; the larger pieces (alligators, for instance) were made out of limbs sawed off Live Oaks, then worked with a hatchet. The paintings are usually painted on plywood and roofing tin with bright enamel. The yard functions as a gallery for people to drive past. Mr. Doyle [...] showed us how he had subdivided it into small garden areas
shaped like stars, hearts, and moons outlined with bottles, providing a variety of angles from which to approach the works displayed there. [...] As Sam said: “Making pictures keeps me busy. When folks carries them away, I got to replace them back.” We wandered about the place and saw Ray Charles; Elvis; “Lincoln Preaching to the Slaves in Frogmore”; “Old Hag” (a witch who came in your sleep and suffocated you by sitting on your face); Joe Lewis; “Bull Dager” (“half-slut, half-stud”); the first black midwife on the island; and a collection of racy ladies up to no good but pleasure.
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SQUARING THE CIRCLE Self-taught artist Daniel Gonçalves talks about what he wants to convey with his intricate drawings TONY THORNE
Gonçalves in 2016, photo: Nuno Marques, Cruzes Canhoto Gallery opposite: #294, 2018, ink on paper, 28 x 39 in./ 70 x 100 cm
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heir strict geometricity can evoke implacable, uncompromising images: the graven metal doors of a bank vault, the cryptic symbology of masonic regalia, bitcoin iconography. At the same time, their almost supernatural symmetries can work like tantric images, like mandalas, as an inducement to and a focus of contemplation. Their patterning suggests the “mobility” of Art Deco whirligig motifs, and modernist works of vortices. For all the associations they might trigger, the works are supremely accomplished, masterfully complete and unique in themselves. The vectors, radials, row-and-column matrices and tessellations, halos, suns, eyes and wheels-within-wheels are all generated not by algorithms but by a single human – or superhuman – draughtsman, the hallucinatory designs painstakingly executed on paper with pen and India ink. “I use archetypes from our collective
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unconsciousness. I hope to convey purity, accuracy, perfection, balance, and forward that energy to the viewers, based on elements that are common to all. For instance, the circle is represented everywhere around the world and it can be the sun, the moon, the earth, magic eyes, cells, the womb, the mandala, the universe… “, explains the artist, Portuguese Daniel Gonçalves. Entirely self-taught, he was first brought to public attention by the Cruzes Canhoto gallery in Porto, where his work was initially exhibited in 2016. Then, in 2017, he also participated in an exhibition at the Oliva Creative Factory in Portugal. Most recently, pieces of his have been exhibited in galleries in France, the US and the UK, and at the Outsider Art Fair in New York in 2019. He explains that his creations were not always so systematic: “They used to be more organic and over time have become more geometric because of my idea – my
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#270, 2018, ink on paper, 14 x 14 in./ 35 x 35 cm
obsession – that they have to be perfect or at least close to perfection. My drawings have evolved from something more figurative and colourful towards something more based on black and white, more abstract, assuming perhaps more symbolism through geometric, minimalistic elements such as circles, triangles, arches.” Gonçalves can be forgiven for wanting to find order and perfection. Born in Porto in 1977, one of five brothers, he endured a troubled – almost Dickensian – upbringing
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at the hands of a father who gambled, drank and had a violent temperament. However, his father was a highly skilled carpenter and gave Gonçalves an appreciation and respect for manual work, and for drawing something beautiful out of unpromising raw material. “I think that was the only decent thing I inherited from him. The capacity to improvise and create”, the artist says. Raised without affection or stability, the Gonçalves brothers all ended up in prison for lesser or greater
#291, 2018, ink on paper, 28 x 20 in./ 70 x 50 cm
“The only decent thing I inherited from my father was the capacity to improvise and create” crimes – with the exception of Daniel, who at the age of twelve was sent to the seminary to save the family some money and to cultivate a vocation. Maltreated there too, he lost any religious faith that he may have had. He returned home hoping to learn his father’s trade, but further physical violence and chaos caused him to move on. He tried working in quarries, then as a bricklayer, then a mechanic, but nothing stuck and he found his way to London where he spent two years as a waiter in a club. Once back in Porto, he worked in bars, restaurants and cafés, but loans, debts and accumulating bills led to bankruptcy and the loss of his house and car. Tracking Gonçalves’ artistic experimentations from their beginnings is difficult, partly because of his troubled, ever-changing living circumstances but also because early examples of his work no longer exist: “Unfortunately, almost everything I produced between 1992 and 2015 was given to family and friends or lost while moving, and the
rest was destroyed. After three or four years without producing anything and after undergoing one of the most depressing periods of my life, I destroyed everything. Even now, when I finish a drawing I put it aside and try not to return to it, mostly for fear of not agreeing with what's there and destroying it.” Today Gonçalves is married with three children and has found some stability. For the last 20 years, he has used the same materials, the same pen and compass, always sitting on the same chair, always facing east. The same old table folds into three parts allowing him to increase or decrease the dimensions of the drawings (although, recently, he has started to feel that perhaps its size might be limiting his work). He prefers to work during the night and follows a strict ritual which demands just the right light, the right music, the right instruments precisely arranged – it all creates the ambience which compels him to concentrate and to work.
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WAR WOUNDS Ronald Mann began to work through the effects of the Vietnam war when he started painting FRED SCRUTON
Bird’s Eye View, c. 1993, 32 x 24 in. / 81 x 61 cm All works are acrylic on canvas, unless otherwise stated
“A
child can paint better than that”, Ronald Mann’s ex-wife Debbie would say. “I do agree with you, but I’m just going to paint anyway. It [makes] no difference to me whether it’s childish or not.” Outside a tavern near Flint, Michigan, about 40 years earlier, he’d been caught up in an altercation: “The judge told me, join the Army or go to jail.” Born in 1943, Mann served one year as an Army helicopter door gunner and ground soldier,
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returning from Vietnam with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in 1968. Unable to cope with regular life, he quit a General Motors factory job, moved often, and struggled to stay employed. Rickie, his wife before Debbie, was an amateur painter. Seeing that the hobby brought her comfort during difficult times, Mann wondered if painting might also provide some relief for him. He began to paint on small canvases in 1992: “I had to get all this
When Johnny Comes Home, 1992, 32 x 30 in. / 81 x 76 cm – playing their own drums, veterans missing arms, legs and minds return from Vietnam without public fanfare
cloudy shit out of my mind... I just keep painting and painting and painting... It [was] almost like an addiction. It [was] either paint or commit suicide.” Mann’s laid-back, pot-smoking, 1960s demeanor, his conversational style (“That’s beautiful, man, right on”), and his braided beard and rose-tinted granny glasses belie the enduring aftermath of his military service. A high-school dropout, he hasn’t had any art therapy or training; but
more than 20 years after he returned from war, painting became a self-therapeutic way of coping with persistent anxiety. Memories and emotions would manifest on the canvas surface – his inner-demons as stark black and white lines and shapes on solid black or white backgrounds. “I finally jumped into something that I could express myself a little bit. I called [my first painting] Heaven or Hell in Vietnam... You [were] either giving your soul to the Devil
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above: Long Way Home, 1994, 28 x 24 in. / 71 x 61 cm opposite: Forgotten POW, 1993, acrylic on panel, 18 x 14 in. / 46 x 36 cm – Mann heard about a naked American soldier hung by his wrists and fed only (poisonous) raw bamboo shoots. His image is symbolic of the torture meted out by both sides
or God. You just asked Jesus [for protection] but at the same time you had to sell your soul to the Devil because you had to kill people.” Mann recalls taking an inkblot test and telling the psychologist, “Well, dude, I see everything, I see more things than you can think of there.” The inkblot became an inspiration for some of his early paintings, and it has “become a way for me to communicate again.” His work Bird’s Eye View suggests an omniscient-but-vacuous eye-inthe-sky shedding two black teardrops: “When you [were]
up there flying, you could see everything, [but, there] was always some teary sadness because of what you [were] doing... killing generations... after generations. When you kill one, you kill all of them, you know what I mean? “Once I hit the ground, the sane part was over and insanity was on. I’ve been riding the insanity trail for a while – that’s why I paint crazy, crazy art.” The walls of Mann’s house are covered with paintings, hung floor-toceiling, overlapping and askew, always in flux – a helterskelter tapestry of his inner-psyche. More than 50 years
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Following the civil war and the execution of his brother, Hafiz Adem went on a perilous journey of migration from Sudan to France, escaping war, prison and death. In Paris, he recorded his experiences in words and drawings Text and images extracted from: Hafiz Adem, The Journey of Hafiz El Sudani, Paris: Dessins sans Papiers, 2018.
My home My name is Hafiz Adem. I was born on August 28, 1990, in Aumkebish, Sudan. Here I drew my family in our village of Am Rubesha, near the town of Wed Benda in western Kordofan. With the blue hat, it’s my father Adem – he’s a farmer. There he can be seen talking with a friend. My mother Fatima wears a green dress; the woman with the cane is my grandmother Mariam; in red, it is Mouna, my big sister; and the one cooking is Manal my little sister. There, my uncle arrives on his
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horse. I am sitting in front of my big brother Moussa, in blue. He had a club where villagers played cards. When I was 15 years old, I told my father that I was not feeling well at school and that I wanted to learn how to work the land like him. He replied that it was ok since I was able to read and say the prayers. In Kordofan, you do not have to buy land – it’s not a question of money. It is the Shaikh, the head of the village, who assigns the plots to the families.
The bombing in Darfur I was 15 years old. It was in 2005. I went to visit a friend who lived in the village of Um Doukhun in Darfur. I was supposed to stay a week, but I liked it there and I stayed two months. I was with my friends when the militia of the Janjawid arrived. They were chasing a group of rebels from the Movement for Justice and Equality.
There were 400 people in the village, many died. My friend lost his uncle and his grandfather. We managed to flee to a camp for displaced people in Darfur called Kalma. Then my friends went to Chad but they told me not to come with them, otherwise I would be taken for a rebel too, so I went back to my village.
The arrest The night before February 2, 2014, we closed [my brother Moussa’s] club without noticing anything unusual. It was in the morning that trouble began. The police came to our house with weapons, they told us they had found the body of a dead man inside the club,
and they accused us of his murder. They had carried the body into their jeep, and they showed him to us, his arms and legs were mutilated, but his face was not. We swore that we did not know this man, but they arrested both of us, in front of our family.
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The prison They took us to jail and tortured us for months to get a confession, but we were innocent. There was no investigation. At my brother’s trial, they asked our entourage to come and testify but there was no witness with us when we closed the club. The victim’s family swore that if we were released, they would kill us. Moussa was sentenced and shot on June 2nd. In Sudan, executions are public, I will never forget that day. At my
trial, two days later, I was so shocked that I could not stand up or talk. I was sentenced to death and taken to the hospital because I was very ill. When I returned to prison, I was told to do forced labour until my execution. In my cell we were ten. In some cells, they were up to 50. We were forced to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., without stopping. As soon as we showed signs of fatigue, the guards beat us with a whip.
The escape A few weeks later, I was working on the construction site, it was about 5 p.m. and the guards were chatting. They were not looking at me. So I dropped my tools and started running. After 50 yards, one of the guards noticed that I had fled and started chasing me. I kept
running as fast as I could until I got to a village. There I found a small grove and I climbed into a tree. I stayed there until late at night As I no longer saw the guards, I went down. It was dark, walked without knowing where I was going until the morning.
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Departure to Libya I knew I had to leave Kordofan as soon as possible. I was hitchhiking and eventually reached Milit. It had been five days since my escape. I met an old man who was the Sheikh of Milit. He asked me why I was barefoot and what I was doing under this heat. I just told him I had lost my shoes running behind a car. He bought me a
pair of sneakers,and told me how to go to Tina in Chad. The next day I went to Tina, then to Basha, and when I called my father back, we met in Milit. He gave me money for my trip and we said goodbye. It was only then that I realized that I would not go back to Sudan and would not see my family again.
The desert The crossing of the desert lasts nine days, it costs 6,000 Sudanese pounds (830 euros). People make this trip in small groups. As I was alone and isolated, two people came to see me. They invited me to share their meals. They were very generous. We stopped three times a
day. In the morning and at noon, because the truck could not drive on the burning road, and in the evening. The smugglers were rationing the water. There were very few and they gave us just enough to prevent our throats to dry.
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PAINTING IN SIGNS The holy world of J.B. Murray CLAYTON SCHUSTER
J.B. Murray in 1987, a few months before his death, photo: Roger Manley
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or most of his life, John Bunion Murray was a tenant farmer whose only goal was to provide for his family. Born in 1908 in Glascock County, Georgia, he had started working the land after leaving school at the age of six. He married Cleo when he was 29 and the couple went on to have eleven children. Murray worked the land for over twelve hours each day to put food on the table; the years passed, the children grew up and went on to have their
own families. In the late 1970s, Cleo became ill and moved in with one of their daughters to be cared for. By this time, Murray had retired and he went to live on the land of one of his sons, in a ramshackle house with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. He lived alone and spent his time tending his vegetable garden and going to church. Then, according to Murray, one day in 1977 he had a fantastic vision – as he watered his potato plants, he
Untitled, c. 1978–88, marker on paper, 14 x 17 in. / 36 x 43 cm, courtesy of John Turner
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Untitled (52 of 60), c. 1978–88, ink on paper, 5.5 x 8.5 in. / 14 x 22 cm, courtesy: Thomas Lax Collection
Untitled, c. 1978–88, marker on paper, 10 x 14 in. / 26 x 36 cm, courtesy: Cavin Morris, New York
said he witnessed the sun descend into his yard while a holy eagle flew nearby. He maintained that his body was illuminated; his hands were drenched with molten yellow; all was warm and pure, and there seemed to be no separation between what was in that sacred moment and his earthly frame. Murray said that God himself then visited him and allowed him to ask any question he pleased. “I asked him to see my mother. He brought her before me and two brothers. And the three come up as a shadow, a spiritual shadow; ain’t like us, ain’t like our body…”. Finally, Murray recalled, the Holy Spirit revealed itself to him in the form of an asemic script (symbols without an oral pronunciation or meaning). “Everything I see is from the sun”, Murray said in a videotaped interview in 1986. “God told me to write these letters. It is the language of the Holy Spirit, direct from God.” He “received” the letters by holding a glass bottle of water toward the sun like a telescope. Considering it was his mission to pass on the godly message to the world’s faithful, Murray scrawled the letters across any materials he could find, including adding-machine tape rolls, Styrofoam and broken chunks of plasterboard. Murray’s neighbours knew him as a quiet, kind man, always ready to lend a hand; his face was marked 56
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by two deep dimples that seemed to guide his mouth into a perpetual smile. He attended church regularly, but wasn’t the most spiritual of men – the sun vision, however, changed that practically overnight. His faith took root and he passionately embraced the opportunity to serve his God. He showed the script to his fellow parishioners at the Second Mineral Springs Baptist Church but his revelation was greeted with concern as well as wonder. Family members urged him to be more discreet but his insistence on the literalness of his vision caused concern and, for a brief time, they had him detained for observation at a psychiatric hospital . Once released from the facility, he started looking for a new way to communicate the Holy Spirit’s message and this led him to discover an unexpected creative flair. Using rocks and waste, he began making talismanic objects that fit in with the African-American yard show tradition. He scattered these apotropaic pieces about his property as a way to protect himself, a messenger of God, from the evils of the world. Murray’s first forays into the fine arts consisted of drawings with lineal flourishes around the asemic texts. The decorative lines evolved into abstract shapes which, once he began appropriating discarded paint cans from the local general store, he filled with colour,
Untitled, c. 1978–88, tempera and graphite on paper, 18 x 24 in. / 46 x 61 cm, courtesy: Shrine, New York
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“I HAD THIS IDEA TO DRAW AND PAINT SOMETHING...” Mark Beyer, with his roots in the comic genre, discusses the processes and methods of his dark and humorous works Born in 1950 in Pennsylvania, the reclusive Mark Beyer started drawing as a boy; a troubled relationship with his father and bouts of violent behaviour meant that he ended up in an institution that was part reform school, part mental hospital. There, bored and unhappy, he found distraction and solace in art and began to develop his own unique style. He did not aspire to be a visual artist – he was more interested in film-making and writing – but his drawings had a comic feel that caught the attention of Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, creators of Arcade: The Comics Revue (1975–76). Beyer went on to have his darkly funny strip Amy and Jordan
included in almost every issue of Raw, the alternative comic magazine edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. This lead to inclusion in other comic publications and also kickstarted a broader artistic career for Beyer. Completely self-taught, he produced many paintings on plexiglass, as featured in Raw Vision #78. Here are Beyer’s latest works, accompanied by his own descriptions and explanations.
All works are pen, ink and acrylic paint on watercolour paper, unless otherwise stated. All photos by James Lawrence
Untitled, 2017, watered down acrylic paint and India ink on typewriter paper glued to board, 15 x 10 in. / 38 x 25 cm I got really bored after years of trying my best to make art that was neat and precise. I decided to go in the opposite direction and started making artwork that is extremely crude and messy. One of the big changes I’ve made with my recent artwork is to work on paper, rather than doing back-painted plexiglass pieces. This approach allows me to paint over areas that I don’t think are
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working. With plexiglass, if I make a mistake or decide to change something, I generally have to throw the piece away and start from scratch. With my new approach, I can simply paint over an area and keep going until I get it to work. This piece went through a lot of changes. I would just paint over areas and keep working until I was satisfied with how it looked.
Untitled, 2017, 18 x12 in. / 46 x 30 cm This started out as a tiny doodle I made on the back of a business card. The original was black linework on a white back ground. In
Untitled, 2018, 12 x18 in. / 30 x 46 cm I tried to get really experimental with this piece and did my best to make it more abstract and mysterious. I don’t know what it means.
the remake, I enlarged the piece and put white figures on a black background. I don’t know what it means. It’s just a pastoral scene.
Untitled, 2018, 12 x18 in. / 30 x 46 cm I had this idea to draw and paint something and then scratch it up with a knife to make it look more mysterious and damaged.
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Untitled, 2018, 12 x 16 in. / 30 x 41 cm I initially made this without the slightest clue as to what it actually meant. Afterwards I started thinking it looked like a courthouse in a big city with a child custody battle taking place. A magistrate is
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about to make a decision regarding whether or not the man and his girlfriend can take custody of his child.
Untitled, 2018, 10.5 x 12 in. / 27 x 30 cm I kept reworking this piece. I kept moving the positions of the white heads around. I finally decided that it looked best if the heads were on the upper right. I tried to make it mysterious by having a man punch another man in the face for some inexplicable reason.
Untitled, 2018, 10 x 14 in. / 25 x 36 cm This piece was initially just a sheet of paper that I taped onto my drawing table in order to keep it clean. Most of the black linework in the background was just me trying to get my pens to work by making random lines. It was only later that I decided to turn the piece into a drawing. I turned some of the ink splotches into heads, and others into random figures,and also added a bit of yellow and black paint. The large figure on the left was the last thing I added.
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CURZIO DI GIOVANNI By reinterpreting glossy magazine images, this Italian artist’s dislocated portraits give vitality to the glamorous world of fashion and celebrity LUCIENNE PEIRY
Untitled, n.d.
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Portrait of an Actress, 2009 All works are graphite and coloured pencil, 13.4 x 9.5 in. / 34 x 24 cm, unless otherwise stated; all works: private collection
“There is a certain inner ghost that one should be able to paint, and not the nose, the eyes, the hair that is outside [...]. A fluidic being that does not correspond to bones and skin [...]. The face has features. I do not care.” Henri Michaux (1899–1984), artist, poet and writer (1)
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he words of Henri Michaux will resonate with anyone familiar with the work of Curzio di Giovanni. The creator of a distinctive and unusual collection of portraits, di Giovanni found inspiration in the pages of glossy magazines and the images of models in fashion shoots and advertising campaigns. He did not replicate the images – on the contrary, he ignored the established rules and principles relating to the proportions of the body and the structure of the face; instead, he bent and manipulated them, and explored the true identity of his subjects to create new and disconcerting versions.
Born in Lodi, in Italy’s Lombardy region, in 1957, di Giovanni has lived with a medical condition and a form of autism that affected his mental and intellectual development. At the age of 22, he entered the Fatebenefratelli Centre, a psychiatric rehabilitation unit near Milan. Years later, in 2001, he began to go to the unit’s on-site studio to draw. His striking creations caught the attention of two artists, Teresa Maranzano and Gabriella Vincenti, who encouraged him, gave him magazine images to work with and followed his creative development. Di Giovanni’s approach to image-making was
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A Lady in a Light Gray Silk Turban, 2010
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A Skier, 2009
Prada magazine advert, reference image for A Skier
Magazine page with reference image for A Girl with Blonde Hair
A Girl with Blonde Hair, 2010
innovative and unrestrained. Starting with a magazine image, he would trace the main elements of the model’s head in pencil. He would then transform the drawing with a mass of details – defined shapes and juxtaposed forms which created areas of shadow and light, wrinkles, creases, dark circles, swellings, strands of hair, and other specific characteristics and irregularities. With its attention to the different planes and facets that
make up the face, di Giovanni’s method led to a mosaic effect, an archipelago of distinct shapes, with the face appearing fragmented and lacking in cohesion. Next, the fragments were re-assembled like the pieces of a puzzle or a building game and, thanks to the colours that the artist energetically applied in coloured pencil, the features of the subject were pulled back together. The face then re-emerged in all its vibrancy.
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JEAN DUBUFFET: A BARBARIAN IN EUROPE Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem), Marseille, France April 30 – September 2, 2019 Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain October 2, 2019 – February 16, 2020 A new exhibition examines the complex roots of the French modernist’s thinking about art brut and highlights the broader, powerful impact of his aesthetic, social and philosophical ideas. Well-informed admirers of the work of outsider artists and visionary autodidacts know that it was the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) who, in the 1940s, based on his own research, formulated a description of a phenomenon he dubbed 72
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EXHIBITIONS
“art brut”. In doing so, he recognised a hitherto unclassified genre of artistic creativity. Even while Dubuffet was alive, and as his own art-making career unfolded, observers pointed out how he had been influenced or inspired by the unconventional creations of self-taught artists. In time, art brut became a well-developed field of research and collecting in its own right. But what about the development of Dubuffet’s aesthetic ideas in the period leading up to the beginning of his exploration of art brut? And, even beyond the evolution of this field – which went on to become influential in its own ways – what were the other aspects of Dubuffet’s theorizing about art and the issues of his time that informed his appreciation of art brut and vice versa, and which became part of his enduring legacy? Such questions serve as starting points for “Jean Dubuffet:
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Eiichi Shibata
Akiko Yokoyama
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ART BRUT FROM JAPAN, ANOTHER LOOK Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland November 29, 2018 – April 28, 2019 In this third showing, since the late 1990s, by the Collection de l’Art Brut of works from Japan, curator Edward M. Gómez, Raw Vision’s senior editor and a longtime specialist in Japanese art and culture, has selected unusual creations by 24 self-taught artists from one of East Asia’s most dynamic countries. His choices include sculptures made with coloured glue (Ryuji Nomoto), strangely embroidered garments (Nana Yamazaki), distorted musical scores (Koji Nishioka), and psychologically intense drawings of human faces (Issei Nishimura). Throughout the exhibition, the curatorial emphasis is on the creators’ technical inventiveness and the unique ways in which they interpret their diverse subject matter. In Eiichi Shibata’s drawings, foaming soap bubbles gather and stick together buoyantly in expansive shapes. In which cell of this art brut creator’s body is the idea of such charmingly abundant forms to be found? As he takes up his paper and ballpoint pens, what kind of instruction does he give his hand in order to draw such beautifully piled-up, circular lines? Here and there, clusters of neatly balanced lines also appear, but where do
they come from – and why? Gazing at Shibata’s “Soap” series of drawings, such questions come surging forth. In Momoka Imura’s ball-shaped, fabric objects covered in plastic buttons, the artist achieves a gentle sense of harmony. She starts with a single piece of fabric that she covers with buttons and gathers up into a ball; she then covers that piece with another button-covered cloth, and so on until she arrives at a finished object. Within each Imura ball lurks a countless number of buttons that, together, create a kind of harmonious feeling that no viewer will ever actually experience. Elsewhere, in Akiko Yokoyama’s marker-on-paper, abstract drawings there appear circular forms and circles that are filled in with more and more circular forms. In this way, could it be that Yokoyama’s works fit into the minimalist art category? No – what she has produced is a genre of its own. Referring to the American modernist sculptor Richard Serra, who also makes abstract drawings, Gómez says, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to someday show Yokoyama’s works and Serra’s side by side?” At first glance, they might resemble each other, but then, considering the contrast between their completely different production methods, one feels like responding, “Yes, that would be interesting.” Kuniko Satonobu Spirig
philipp schöpke.! Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria October 25, 2018 – March 10, 2019 During his lifetime, the Austrian-born art brut maker Philipp Schöpke (1921-1998) did not achieve the same level of renown as some of his peers who were also associated with the Artists’ House and the studio at the Art Brut Centre Gugging, on the northwestern outskirts of Vienna. However, this career-spanning survey did a fine job of revisiting his legacy and carving a muchdeserved place for his remarkable achievements in the canon of the work of the most original autodidacts. Organised by Museum Gugging’s director, Johann Feilacher, and Maria Höger – a young, German-born art historian on the museum’s research and curatorial team – this comprehensive exhibition examined the evolution of Schöpke’s distinctive style of draughtsmanship while calling attention to his art’s themes and technical character. Born in 1921 in northeastern Austria, Schöpke was regarded as an awkward youth, and was bullied by other children and chided by his father. In 1939, after the Nazis annexed Austria into Germany, Schöpke served short stints in the German military, where he was again mistreated apparently. By 1956, he had moved to the psychiatric hospital at Gugging, a precursor institution to the art centre that exists today. In his pencil drawings from the 1960s and 1970s, Schöpke simultaneously presented external and internal views of human figures or small animals. His humans appear with outstretched arms and are marked with carefully observed details, such as
kneecaps, eyebrows or toes. Their heads are topped with big piles of hair, and their open mouths reveal long rows of menacing teeth. During his later years, Schöpke made abstract drawings in coloured pencil on paper – the all-over, energetic, broad strokes of which obscure underlying images of human figures. These are surely some of the most mysterious – and strangely enchanting – pictures anywhere in the annals of art brut. Edward M. Gómez RAW VISION 101
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EXHIBITIONS
Barbara Sückfull
Judith Scott
Madge Gill
Marie-Rose Lortet
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FLYING HIGH: WOMEN IN ART BRUT Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, Austria February 15 – June 23, 2019 Featuring more than 300 works in a variety of media and genres, this wide-ranging exhibition examines the ideas, personal stories and accomplishments of female creators in the art brut field. It looks back chronologically at their contributions to the genre as it evolved as a research and collecting category. It also examines self-taught female artists’ highly individualistic expressions in a contemporary, international setting. Co-curated by Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien’s director, Ingried Brugger, and Hannah Rieger – a Vienna-based collector known for her extensive art brut holdings – “Flying High” looks at the pioneering research of certain psychiatrists who, in the early 20th century, took a diagnostic interest in their patients’ creations at hospitals in Europe. It highlights the art of women who were associated with institutions like the University of Heidelberg’s psychiatric hospital in Germany, where the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn developed a collection in the early 1920s. The exhibition also looks at female artists’ works in the 78
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collection of L’Aracine, an art association founded in France in the 1980s, whose holdings were later donated to the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Art, and Art Brut. Many well-known makers of art brut have been included: Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964), whose majestic, 14-metre-long drawing Le Cloisonné de Théâtre (1950–51), in coloured pencil on pieced-together sheets of paper, evokes her fantasy romance with Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm II; Judith Scott (1943–2005), a maker of enigmatic, yarn-covered objects; and Madge Gill (1882–1961), the British mediumistic artist. Less well known are the mixedmedia dinosaurs of the contemporary German sculptor Julia Krause-Harder; the psychologically intense, X-ray-like drawings of the Austrian Ida Maly (1894–1941); and the cut-out drawings of muscular human figures of Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, who lives and works in Cuba and does not communicate verbally. Of the art-making techniques and themes to be found in the exhibition, co-curator Rieger says, “No less than their male peers, women creators of art brut have given vivid form to their visions of imaginary or inner worlds, or to their interpretations of subjects that have been deeply meaningful to them.” Edward M. Gómez