RAWVISION95 AUTUMN/FALL 2017
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 ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com USA 119 West 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023 (Standard envelopes only) ISSN 0955-1182
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RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world
OBITUARIES David Boxer and OL Samuels
MARTÍN RAMÍREZ Preview of retrospective at ICA LA
PARADISE LOST New series of works by Daniel Martin Diaz
EVELYN REYES Minimal representative works
TURBULENCE! Outsider Art from the Balkans
ENCHANTED HIGHWAY Giant sculptures on Dakota plains
FRANK BRUNO Powerful work of apocalyptic visionary
RIERA STUDIOS Work from Havana, Cuba
BEVERLY BAKER Works out of darkness
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and books
GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE A round-up of notable venues around the world
COVER IMAGE: Daniel Martin Diaz, Pain Tree, 2016, Graphite and Crimson pencil on paper, 27 x 32 ins / 68.6 x 81.3 cm
Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) June 2017 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. Postmaster: send address corrections to Raw Vision c/o UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. USA subscription office: 119 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023. (Standard envelopes only). 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
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AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRITAIN
CHRISTOPHER KANE SHOWS GUGGING AND TALPAZAN
until April 2, 2018
Summer through Autumn/Fall 2017
William Edmondson
THE MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING AT MONA
With over 100 self-taught artists and almost 2,000 artworks, dating from 1800 to the present day, this is The Museum of Everything’s most expansive show to date. Artists include Paul Laffoley, Adolf Wölfli, Karl Junker, George Widener, Judith Scott and Henry Darger. MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) 655 Main Road Berriedale, Hobart Tasmania 7011, AUSTRALIA mona.net.au
London-based fashion designer Christopher Kane has been inspired by Gugging artists Heinrich Reisenbauer and Johann Korec whose work was also displayed at the London showroom. The next installation and Autumn/Winter 2017 collection will feature UFO artist Ionel Talpazan. During Frieze London art week this October, Christopher Kane and Raw Vision will team up for a special event – more details to follow in Raw Vision Weekly. CHRISTOPHE KANE 6 Mount Street, London W1K 3EH, UK. www.christopherkane.com
BIRDMAN AND JENS MOHR AT GUGGING
THE CABINETS AT DR. GUISLAIN MUSEUM
Willem Van Genk
ongoing
Sep 24 – Nov 19
Over May 4–6, 2018, Outside In will be hosting the annual European Outsider Art Conference at Pallant House Gallery. Proposals for presentations are invited around the theme of “the artist’s voice” and how best to give support. Contact Marc Steene by October 30 at m.steene@pallant.org.uk . OUTSIDE IN, PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 North Pallant, Chichester PO19 1TJ www.outsidein.org.uk
Painted Dreams is an exhibition of recent paintings by selftaught intuitive painter Eileen Schaer. THE HOUSE OF MANANNAN Manx National Heritage, Mill Road, Peel, Isle of Man IM5 1TA, UK www.eileenschaer.com
BLINKO AND NEATE AT JENNIFER LAUREN GALLERY
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Chris Neate
Oct 5–8
The Cabinets, a collaboration between the Collectie De Stadshof Foundation (The Netherlands) and the Dr. Guislain Museum presents works of 30 outsider artists. Until October 10, Ave Luïa, organised by La ‘S’ Grand Atelier (Vielsalm) presents artworks inspired by Catholic imagery. DR. GUISLAIN MUSEUM Jozef Guislainstraat 43, 9000 Gent, Belgium www.museumdrguislain.be
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EILEEN SCHAER
deadline Oct 30, 2017
Eileen Schaer
An exhibition in honour of two artist friends, more than a bird – 25 years of artistic friendship: birdman & jens mohr is a mix of spontaneous artworks, with tapestries and opulent wall objects by Birdman Hans Langner and wittily arranged assemblages by Jens Mohr. GALERIE GUGGING Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA www.gugging.com
EOA CONFERENCE 2018
Thompson Hall
Jens Mohr
Sep 28 – Nov 15
The Jennifer Lauren Gallery and Henry Boxer Gallery present Blinko & Neate: Unlocking Worlds, featuring intricate drawings by Nick Blinko and automatic creations by Chris Neate: fantastical attention to detail with microscopic precision. JENNIFER LAUREN GALLERY 264 Globe Road, London, E2 0JD www.jenniferlaurengallery.com
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NETHERLANDS, SERBIA, SWITZERLAND
COLONY OF NAÏVE AND MARGINAL ART
MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS
Oct 28 – Dec 30
July 2017
until Nov 12
In Cuba Outside, works by five artists from the Riera Studio, Cuba, are shown in the first comprehensive exhibition of Cuban outsider art held outside of Cuba. GALERIE HAMER Leliegracht 38-HS, 1015 DH Amsterdam, Netherlands www.galeriehamer.nl
The nineteenth Colony of Naïve and Marginal Art, organised by the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art, took place in Zlatibor in July. For nine days, 24 outsider artists from around the world came together in support of international co-operation and respect for self-taught art. Artists included Raymond Morris (UK), Evelyne Postic (France), Katsumi Tsuji (Japan) and Ermelinda de Almeida (Brazil) and Julia Sisi (Portugal). MUSEUM OF NAIVE AND MARGINAL ART Jagodina, SERBIA. www.NaiveArt.rs
MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE
GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS until Nov 3
Walter Wegmüller
La Pia
GALERIE HAMER
Museum im Lagerhaus presents Art, Krautrock, and Tarot on the work of the Basel-based self-taught artist Walter Wegmüller who was part of the 60s/70s psychedelic art scene and worked with HR Geiger. MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS Davidstrasse 44, CH-9000 St. Gallen, SWITZERLAND www.museumimlagerhaus.ch
COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT until Nov 30
Carte Blanche includes work by Johan Tahon, Wendell Kerwhen and Livia Dencher. November 17 through January 12, Masters of Herenplaats presents work by Sander Troelstra, Ben Augustus, Coen Ringeling, Jeroen Pomp and Mies van der Perk. GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS Schietbaanstraat 1, 3014 ZT Rotterdam, Netherlands www.herenplaats.nl
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Three stories from Zürich presents works by Hans Krüsi, Emil Medardus Hagner and Gebhard Hafner, many of which are being exhibited for the first time. MUSÉE VISIONNAIRE Predigerplatz 10 - 8001 Zürich, SWITZERLAND museevisionnaire.ch
Anna Zemánková
Johan Tahon
Hans Krüsi
until Dec 23
A major retrospective of works by Czech artist Anna Zemánková features almost 130 drawings, together with archival documents, a film and a major monograph. Through October 1, Michael Golz – Travel in the Country of Athos features a 200-square-metre map, along with drawings and texts. COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT, Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, SWITZERLAND www.artbrut.ch
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USA
DE YOUNG MUSEUM
AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM Oct 7, 2017 – Sep 2, 2018
ART MOURA AT GOOD LUCK GALLERY Oct 21 – Dec 17
The Great Mystery Show playfully explores the mystery behind great art, science, and pursuit of the sacred and celebrates the strangeness and wonder of Life itself. Until February 28, Reverend Albert Lee Wagner: Miracle At Midnight features 50 masterpieces. AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230. www.avam.org
Art Moura returns to The Good Luck Gallery for his second solo exhibition, featuring his signature hybridassemblage mixed media figures. Referencing voodoo dolls, Native American amulets and fetishistic objects, the exhibition will include the addition of powerful bricolage tapestries that exude the same capricious balance of potent phantasms. Through October 15, PHANTASMATA presents Cathy Ward‘s intimate drawings and large-scale paintings and sculptures. THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY, 945 Chung Kind Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012. www.thegoodluckgallery.com
SLOTIN FOLK ART AUCTION
FOLK ART CONFERENCE
Nov 11-12
Oct 19–22
William A. Hall
until Oct 22
William A. Hall: Car Drawings, 2008–2017, in collaboration with Henry Boxer Gallery (UK), is Hall’s first gallery show. The self-taught artist, living as a homeless person in Los Angeles, uses cars for his studios to draw his retro-futuristic vehicles gliding through gnarly Middle-earth-like environments. ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY, 212 Bowery New York NY 10012 www.edlingallery.com
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JORDAN-SAUER until Oct 20
Sabinita Lopez Ortiz
WILLIAM A. HALL IN NEW YORK
Art Moura
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present their acquisition from Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Revelations: Art from the African American South includes work by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Mose Tolliver and Purvis Young. DE YOUNG MUSEUM Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118. famsf.org
Slotin Folk Art Auction: Slavery, Freedom & Beyond 1,000 lots include the Acacia Collection of African Americana and the contents of South Carolina’s Historical Old Slave Mart and Museum. 770 532-1115 SLOTIN FOLK ART Buford, Georgia slotinfolkart.com
The Folk Art Society of America’s 30th Annual Folk Art Conference, Santa Fe, NM, will explore The Folk Art of New Mexico & Beyond. There will be a symposium at the Museum of International Folk Art, visits to the homes of eight collectors and artist’s studios, and the annual folk art auction. folkart.org/conference
Marjorie Jordan-Sauer
Nancy Josephson
Mary T. Smith
until Apr 1
The Arts Illiana Gallery devotes its space to the mosaic works of self-taught artist Marjorie JordanSauer (1934–2015). ARTS ILLIANA GALLERY 23 N. 6th Street, Terre Haute, Indiana 47807 facebook.com/ artsillianagallery
MARTÍN RAMÍREZ AT NEW L.A. ART VENUE The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, opens with a powerful Ramírez inaugural exhibition EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
above: Untitled (Train and Tunnel), c. 1960–63, gouache, coloured pencil and graphite on pieced paper,13 × 32.5 ins. / 33 × 83 cm, collection of Mary Lee Copp and Peter Formanek
opposite: Untitled (Horse and Red Rider), n.d., gouache, coloured pencil, and graphite on pieced paper, 34.5 × 24.5 in. / 87.6 × 62.2 cm, collection of Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson
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he inaugural exhibition at the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, a venue that evolved out of the former Santa Monica Museum of Art, is a probing, illuminating survey of the work of Martín Ramírez, the Mexican-born, self-taught artist whose technically innovative, mixed-media drawings have earned him a central place in the canon of definitive art brut and outsider art masters. “Martín Ramírez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation” will remain on view at the ICA LA through December 31, 2017. It is part of “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA”, a region-wide exhibition series that will run through January 2018. Collectively, these shows examine the impact and influence of Latin American culture on that of southern California. The exhibitions programme is funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust. Born in Jalisco, in west-central Mexico, Ramírez (1895–1963) was the son of poor sharecroppers who were devout Catholics. He received only a rudimentary education and, as a young man, lacked money with which to purchase his own land. In the mid 1920s, he left
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his wife and children and headed north to the United States in search of work. It is believed that, in California, he laboured as a railroad builder, and elsewhere as a miner. In Mexico, in 1926, the Cristero Rebellion broke out. In this civil war, armed Catholics fought the Mexican federal government’s secularising forces. Ramírez’s native region became a bastion of pro-Church fighters, but he did not return home. No one knows how Ramírez survived the subsequent Great Depression in the United States, but in 1931, apparently suffering from mental illness, he was picked up as a vagrant by police in central California. Later, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and jails. In 1948, diagnosed with schizophrenia and tuberculosis, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital in northern California, where he resided until his death. There, he made drawings using matchsticks dipped in a paste of melted crayon wax, fruit juice, charcoal, shoe polish and his own saliva. He drew on and affixed collage elements to found papers, which he glued together with a mixture of saliva and masticated potatoes.
Elsa Longhauser, the ICA LA’s director, was also the head of the former museum out of which this new venue emerged. Her familiarity with Ramírez’s art dates back to an exhibition of his work she organised for the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, in 1985. Recently, she noted that the ICA LA’s Ramírez exhibition features 51 works from various sources, including many from the collection of the Chicago-based husband-and-wife artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson. In the early 1970s, Nutt rediscovered Ramírez’s works and called them to the attention of the now-retired American art dealer Phyllis Kind, who brought many of them to market. Separately, Nutt and Nilsson acquired a large group of Ramírez works. Over the years, they have rarely been seen publicly. Among the exhibition’s highlights from Nutt and Nilsson’s holdings: a large, mixed-media, scroll-like work
measuring some 18 feet in length (about 5.5 metres). “It’s a summary of Ramírez’s familiar subjects,” Longhauser said. The scroll was prepared for display by Harriet Stratis, the senior research conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Also on view are superb examples of Ramírez’s serpentine tunnels, stately jinetes (horsemen) and Madonnas. To expand the discussion surrounding Ramírez’s life and art, Longhauser invited James Oles, a professor at Wellesley College, Connecticut, who focuses on Mexican art, and Josh Kun, a cultural historian at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, to write texts for the exhibition catalogue. Longhauser noted, “This show celebrates the indomitable spirit of Ramírez’s art.” RAW VISION 95
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DANIEL MARTIN DIAZ PARADISE LOST Diaz discusses his new work with Raw Vision’s editor John Maizels John Maizels: What inspired you to embark on an interpretation of Milton’s epic, visionary poem, Paradise Lost? Daniel Martin Diaz: I became interested in John Milton after finding out he was hugely important to the Romantic poets, for his political stance as well as the model of his writing. After studying William Blake and his contemporaries, and regarding their unease about the future, I was led to John Milton and Paradise Lost. There have been famous artists in the past who have interpreted Paradise Lost in their own ways, including Blake, John Martin and Gustav Doré, but these artists all presented literal figurative depictions of the dramatic events. How do you see your own interpretation differs from these? My interpretation is based on the anxieties and beliefs of our modern world. The uncertainty of technology, morality and social norms. Blake, Martin, and Doré had literal interpretations of Paradise Lost. My work is a philosophical and metaphorical inquiry into our understanding of our current world. Milton gives us a template to contemplate and to view society through a zoomed out prism... view the world from a further perspective, rather than getting caught up in the minutiae, and seeing the big forces at work. As humans, we tend to see things from our own personal views and try to make sense of them. Reading Paradise Lost and studying Milton’s life gave me an overall tone, and clearer understanding of my beliefs and non-beliefs. I believe Milton, on a deep level, has given people after him the bravery to question social norms and authority. To not accept things that may seem true and to dig deeper for what really is true. It made me ask questions, such as does evil really exist? What are beliefs? Will science ever deliver 100% truth as long as humans are involved? Do the elites really have our own best interest? And so on. He has also given us the courage to stand up against injustice and what we believe in our hearts. Are there any specific messages that you have gained from the experience of immersing yourself in this series? Yes! My belief system was transformed. My belief in social norms and the rules that keep the fabric of society together. My understanding that the primal man/beast that lies deep in all of us is kept at bay, with the rules society puts on us. The main lesson for me is to break away from the herd and ask questions that go against old fashioned rules.
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One of the main themes of Paradise Lost is Satan’s rebellion leading to the Fall of Man - is this an element that influenced you? Yes, Milton had an interesting perspective on Satan. He appears to be heroic and empathetic in the first two poems. You soon realise he was no Romantic Hero, he’s a narcissistic degenerate. The biggest gift Satan provided humanity is the path to salvation. His temptation and removal of humanity from the Garden of Eden through Adam and Eve provided the steps to deliverance for all. Satan has given humanity the ability to distinguish good from evil, empathy from cruelty, and love from hate. I believe these contrasting ideals are what create and define humanity. Do you think there is eventual redemption for Man? I believe the fate of humanity lies at the hands of the universe and every underlying process that influences the universe. At some point in the distant future, Earth will be destroyed by the Sun going Supernova. Whether or not humanity makes it to that point is unknown, but it seems unlikely. Everything we have ever created will, at some point, become dust and once again degrade to some basic form blown throughout the universe by cosmic winds. I believe we were “damned” the moment we became a conscious creature and our ”redemption” will be our destruction because all suffering, sin, good, error, love, evil; virtually everything we’ve associated with the human condition, will be destroyed.
opposite: This Darkness Light, 21 x 34 ins. / 53.3 x 86.4 cm “This was the first piece in the series. When I completed this piece, I had no idea I was going to embark on creating my own interpretation of Paradise Lost. If someone would have asked or commissioned me to create this series I would have said they were crazy because of the sheer audacity and the emotional energy it would have taken to create it. This piece is about the arrangements and compromises humans with power tend to do. Regardless if the person or entity they are dealing with has bad or good intentions. It doesn't matter; it’s about the deal at whatever cost. Even if it puts one’s beliefs, countryman, or country in peril? We as citizens have no say in what's going on behind closed doors. This Horror Will Grow Mild, This Darkness Light is the bittersweet victory we have when we overthrow and question authority to get to the ultimate truth.”
All works are graphite and crimson pencil on paper, 2016
The Last Supper, 30 x 38 ins. / 76.2 x 96.5 cm “I was at a wake for the death of a relative and kept staring at a painting of the Last Supper next to the altar. I asked myself, who’s to say what we believe in is the correct way to believe? For instance, people who believe in UFOs are as passionate as people who believe in Christ or any other religion or science. We have to accept people’s beliefs regardless of how out of this world they may seem. The hooded characters surrounding Christ are the hidden people making back room deals that affect all of us. They cloak themselves with select ideas to gain power. They take advantage of the naive good in all of us to enrich themselves. They feed on us like predators and we keep giving.” 20
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Age of Apocalypse, 35 x 32 ins. / 88.9 x 81.3 cm “I believe societies in the past have felt that they are living through an apocalypse of sorts such as WWII and the Black Plague Era. The Apocalypse could possibly be a metaphor for turbulent times. We are living through turbulent times where our altruistic nature is being tested by terrorism and technology. Technology is crossing new thresholds of morality. Information and knowledge is being controlled by a few corporations. The rise of AI systems is awaking our worst fears that sci-fi writers have been predicting for years. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make of Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven’. This phrase from Paradise Lost resonated with me. It reminded me of Milton, Nietzsche, and Salinger sitting there writing and carrying the burden of humanity on their shoulders. Suffering for us to become closer to the truth. Questioning themselves and society creating a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. The small shadowy figures in the foreground is humanity not understanding and humbled by the grandeur of it all. Creating a belief system out of something that is not understood.” RAW VISION 95
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A CARROT IS A CARROT Reverential and minimal abstractions by Evelyn Reyes, an artist from California’s Creativity Explored workshop
LAWRENCE RINDER
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All images Š Creativity Explored Licensing, LLC
Carrots, c. 2006–09, oil pastel on paper, 11 x 17 ins. / 27.9 x 43.2 cm
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he art of Evelyn Reyes (b. 1957) combines hieroglyphic-like images with viscerally intense mark-making and sensuous colour. Her drawings possess a feeling of tremendous conviction: the images are rubbed and smeared and burnished onto the paper, until they appear to be printed rather than drawn. In her work, Reyes seems to be telling us something of which she is utterly certain, repeating many of her motifs time and time again, as if to underscore the necessity of their being. Yet, her work is far from rote or automatic as every drawing displays nuances of composition, shape, colour and line. Even among similarly coloured drawings of the same motif, there are shifts of balance and density that create surprisingly diverse effects. Reyes’ manner of working through repetition with slight shifts in composition and style, recalls the method of artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Richard Serra. This is a quintessentially Modernist approach, in which artistic progress is judged not by progressively more accurate representation of external reality, but by RAW VISION 95
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iterative transformation from one work of art to the next. The work of art, in this modality becomes a representation of its own truth. It’s not so much art for art’s sake (it is for our sake, after all) as it is a sustained exploration of art in its most reduced and essential form, which asks us again and again to drop our assumptions about aesthetics and habits of seeing in order to confront beauty, naked and unmasked. Reyes has focused on a relatively small number of motifs, primarily carrots, garbage cans, and fences (a motif that Evelyn formerly called “cakes”). There are a number of other motifs that she produced infrequently or, perhaps only once or twice: coffee cups, donuts, couches, and an unidentified coffin-like shape. She sometimes will combine motifs, especially in her “fence” works, in which there may be carrots, sandwiches, bells, spools and so on, placed in the upper right and left corners of the 26
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compositions. Reyes frequently repeats a motif multiple times in a single drawing. The motif that she calls “carrots” is among her most favoured images. Most people would not recognise the form as the root vegetable of that name. Reyes has distilled the elongated cone of this common plant into a potent, bullet-like abstraction. She almost always repeats the motif three times on each sheet, sometimes in a row and sometimes with two stacked horizontally adjacent to a single vertical “carrot”. At a certain point, Reyes began to add a “stem” to these shapes, using a ruler to create an emphatically straight line extending down one side of the form. In later works, the “stem” becomes thicker and more pronounced, a vigorous counterbalance to the double triangulation at the other end of each form. This “stem” however, appears to be at the wrong end of the “carrot,” if we read the more rounded side as the bottom and the
Carrots, circa 2004–2009, oil pastel on paper, 11.25 x 17.25 ins / 28.6 x 43.8 cm
triangulated end as the top (that is, the leaves). Finally, of course, it isn’t a carrot at all. It is an abstract form, and the need to add a line is a need dictated by the form itself, discovered in its repetition, and perfected on paper through trial and error. Another favoured motif is the garbage can, which, like the carrot, is not realistically portrayed. The form that goes by this name is a nearly symmetrical, urn-like image with two bulges on either side at the middle. The garbage cans are always shown in pairs and, as such, produce an uncanny mirroring effect. As in all of her work – but especially in these – the negative space plays a significant role, creating a potent afterimage: top and bottom, interior and exterior appear in queasy balance. While Reyes’ preferred technique is to lay down a thick impasto of oil stick medium, there are a number of drawings in which she shows notable restraint,
articulating her forms with thin, delicate lines. This is so especially in some of her “fence” (or “cake”) drawings. Here, it is structure, rather than shape, that is the primary focus. These have undergone a rather drastic evolution, from tent-like forms with stippled interiors to pom-pom topped cages to elongated grid shapes that look like houses or, perhaps, furniture. With rare exceptions, Reyes’ drawings are monochrome, though she often uses tinted paper to create a dramatic contrast with the colour of the marks themselves. Indeed, this is one of the great strengths of her work: each drawing feels like a love letter to a particular colour: peach, pink, forest green, canary yellow, clay red, cobalt blue, black. She will at times accent a colour by overlaying a light shade upon a darker, or vice versa. Also, because of the thickness with which she lays down oil stick on paper, and the ancillary marks made in RAW VISION 95
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TURBULENCE! OUTSIDERS IN THE BALKANS A large survey exhibition at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris celebrates the vibrant self-taught art of Serbia NINA KRSTIĆ
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ocial turbulence and crises hit Serbia in the 1930s and 1940s, when alliances crumbled and Yugoslav political relationships soured. Wars and massive economic and social impacts left deep scars on society and culture, until reconstruction brought ideas of emancipation and modernisation. The environment changed as factories replaced fields and people left villages for work in towns and cities. Sometimes people were permanently displaced from the homes their ancestors had lived in for centuries. In the history of self-taught artists in Serbia, three key factors can be identified around these decades that relate to the changing sociopolitical atmosphere. The first took place alongside modernisation, when, under pressure from the rapid changes, interest in traditional folk art began to wane. This impending loss was felt more keenly by people who had moved to cities, leaving their family homes, and there were pockets of people who, spurred by nostalgia, worked to preserve threatened customs. The second key factor was the appearance of selftaught art, known as naive art, which started to be established within the borders of culture. It was accompanied by the idea that art should not only be the privilege of the elite but should be available to all. The torchbearer of this idea, and one of the greatest promoters of self-taught art in Serbia at the time, was 30
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Oto Bihalji Merin (1904–1993), an idealist, essay writer, art critic and revolutionary. The third factor was the founding of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art (MNMA) in Jagodina, Serbia, in 1960, at the same time as the expansion of self-taught art across former Yugoslavia. As a national institution for the protection of naive and marginal art, the MNMA worked to separate self-taught visionary art from amateurism by applying clear criteria and using a stringent selection process. After over 50 years of labourious work, with some 700 exhibitions and the publication of a similar number of published books, their autochthonous ideas have been articulated, with impressive artworks and a truly creative energy. Recently, other organisations and venues associated with a sense of the marginal or countercultural have opened. Devastated and abandoned warehouses, cinemas, theatres and factory halls carry inventive visual messages, and young, creative people gather in them. These galleries and art associations reveal the arrival of a fascination with non-mainstream art aesthetics, moving from the margins to become attractive above: Ilija Bosilj Bašicević , Empress Milica in Walk, 1967, oil on hardboard, 25 x 48.5 ins. / 63 x123 cm, MNA “Ilijanum”Šid opposite: Vojislav Jakic, Demagogue, 1973, mixed techniques on paper, 13 x 9 ins. / 33 x 22.5 cm, MNMA, Jagodina
Sava Sekulić, The Germ of Life, 1974, oil on cardboard, 28 x 19.3 ins. / 71 x 50 cm, MNMA, Jagodina
Vojislav Jakic ,Untitled, 1987, indian ink on paper, 19.7 x 24.3 ins. / 50 x 62 cm, MNMA, Jagodina
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.Sava Sekulić, Martyrs, 1974, oil on cardboard, 27.5 x 39.3 ins. / 70 x 100 cm, MNMA, Jagodina
on all levels. Personal creative visions surpassed the disappointments and failures of everyday life, transforming social isolation into artistic splendour. The pictorial expression and language of Serbian self-taught visionaries is quite free from the stereotypes that can accompany art brut and outsider art. They radiate with authenticity, and show a freedom of subject choice and of typical artistic methods. The impulse towards a pure creation, vital and sensuous, is certainly a good reason for the exhibition at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris. Vojislav Jakić (1932–2003) made raw, uncensored, grandiose nightmares come alive on his monumental paper scrolls after his marriage dissolved in the late 1960s. These personal, apocalyptical visions depicted his suffering. I met him, many years later, when he became a kind of victim of his passion, but he challenged me with his charisma and controversial personality, which never gave up. He talked like an idiosyncratic philosopher, in the light of own aura, just as he painted: in metaphors. In his parallel world, he was in everlasting dialogue with the phantasms from his subconciousness, which he described in his autobiography, Nemenikuće (1970). Working tirelessly – nearly obsessively – on his manuscript, he added illustrations to his text, in ballpoint pen on standard office paper. Large-format late drawings are closely connected to the illustrations of this manuscript.
His whole world is reflected in them: “Don’t look at my drawings with your eyes, but with your mind”, he wrote. Two decades before Jakić, Sava Sekulić (1902–1989) also worked within an environment that never accepted him in Serbia, until the relationship with the aesthetic shifted and opened to a new, separate chapter in twentiethcentury Serbian art. Sekulić began painting in his early thirties, but it wasn't until three decades later that his works were singled out as unique, at the annual exhibition of amateurs at Gallery of People’s University in Belgrade, 1964. Later, in 1972, the MNMA organised a retrospective exhibition in Jagodina. Since then, Sekulić's artworks have had a prominent place in the permanent display at the MNMA, evidence that artworks by pronounced self-taught artists are first class. In his oeuvre, Sekulić defied time and space. His works always tell an original story, stemming from traditional sagas and beliefs, both pagan and Christian, and weaving together the mythological, historical and autobiographical. His originality of technique and forms come from his intuitive sensuality. With his childish wisdom and instinctive energy, he painted the origins of own being. Sava Sekulić had an inborn hypersensitivity, and an instinctive inclination to creative contemplation. He painted and wrote poems and dramas instinctively, out of a vital need. His paintings are full of inventive RAW VISION 95
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THE ENCHANTED HIGHWAY Gary Greff’s giant scrap-metal sculptures in North Dakota
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efore the creation of the Enchanted Highway, Gary Greff didn’t have an art or welding background. He was a junior high school principal and a fifth and sixth grade educator in Poplar, Montana. In 1989, the Regent, North Dakota native came back to his hometown to help his ageing parents and he noticed that his hometown’s population was drying up. “I saw that the town of Regent was dying and I had to do something”, Greff said. Regent is a town of 100 people, nestled in the rolling hills, buttes, cut banks and valleys of the southwest corner of North Dakota. It is a quiet community with a strong agricultural foundation. It has also gained a reputation for being a hunter’s paradise. Greff’s original plan came to him one fall as he was helping his mother in their garden. While picking onions, he thought of a fresh, diced, onion product and envisioned a factory in Regent. After much speculation and research, Greff invested his savings into a research firm based out of Portage la Prairie in Canada, but he wasn’t about to put all of his onions in one basket – there had to be something else. That same year the 32-mile stretch of road connecting Gladstone to Regent in rural southwest North Dakota was paved. Something clicked when a local farmer started to get a little publicity for creating a roadside statue of a small metal man lifting a hay bale. “That’s what the
Pheasants on the Prairie, 1996. The rooster pheasant stands 40 ft / 12.2 m and the hen 35 ft / 10.7 m, photo: Sabrina Hornung RAW VISION 95
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Geese in Flight, 2006, 110 x 154 ft / 33.5 x 46.9 m, 157,659 lb / 71512.9 kg. The largest goose has a 30-foot (9.1 metre) wingspan, photo: Sabrina Hornung
ranchers and the farmers and the whole midwest are good at – they’re good at welding”, said Greff. “Let’s use what they’re good at to our advantage.” “I thought, nobody’s going to stop for normal sculptures, but they might stop for the world’s largest”, he said. Until that point, he had never laid a bead of weld. Upon encountering Gary Greff, you’re met with a big smile. You’ll soon see the spark in his eye, and find out that his enthusiasm is contagious. He approached the local civics board for approval for his plan, and then rallied the local farmers and ranchers who eventually taught Greff how to weld. Together, in 1991, they created the first sculpture on the highway called Tin Family: three figures large enough to have wheel hubs for eyes, augers for earrings and bullet holes for freckles – unfortunately, the latter was not Greff’s doing. When Greff started the project he asked for and accepted donations, but found that his yard was filling up quickly, and questions were being asked once donors didn’t see their metal being put to use. Now, Greff sources from junkyards, and purchases what he needs when he needs it. According to Greff, when choosing his subject matter he asks himself three questions. Would it look good 60 feet tall? Does it fit the North Dakota theme? 40
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And, can it be done? Greff is a self-taught artist. “When I made it to sixth grade, art was done”, he said. “They didn’t offer it in high school. Nobody took art in high school – I never really knew there was such a thing as art.” While plotting designs for his sculptures, he carefully sketches his scaled-down design on graph paper. Before the high school in Regent closed in 2003, he would request access to the school gym on a Friday night when it was not in use. He would then spread butcher paper across the gym floor and work to scale. Now Greff owns the former high school, and has transformed it into The Enchanted Castle Hotel. Sticking to the whimsical theme of the highway, the medieval themed hotel holds 19 rooms, a steakhouse and a tavern. Greff’s latest endeavour is a 40-foot-tall knight, complete with shining armour. While we were there, the frame lay dormant on the lawn of the long-abandoned former elementary school building. Greff doesn’t have a shop that he works out of. He works on his sculptures outside, “That’s why I’d like to get the knight done by this fall.” The knight’s helmet is still a work in progress. He envisions the sculpture standing outside the Enchanted Castle, not far from where it lies, accompanied by a fearsome sculpture of a fire-breathing dragon. The
Grasshoppers in the Field, 1999, 40 ft / 12.2 m, photo: Sabrina Hornung
dragon’s eyes will light up and it will breathe fire every hour, on the hour. As he described his vision, his own eyes sparkled, and he walked excitedly around the sculpture as it lay on the sod like a Frankenstein’s monster. Greff’s biggest challenge was selecting the correct gauge of tin for the knight’s exterior. The tin is carefully wrapped around a timber skeletal structure. “Metal doesn’t work like paper – it doesn’t just bend”, Greff said. The initial plan for his next sculpture was a 70- by 70foot spiderweb, built with three-quarter-inch cables. It was to be suspended from a colourful array of prairie flowers. The spiders would be built from salvaged cement truck mixers. The only problem for Greff was securing the land. The land that hosts the sculptures is on loan from local farmers and, unfortunately, not everyone in his hometown sees the value of his project. “I always say you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. I’ve led Regent to water with the Enchanted Highway. They don’t want to drink.” Greff continued: “I also believe that one day that horse will get so thirsty that that horse will want to drink, eventually. They’ll come and say – how can we be a part of this?” In 2015, a kickstarter campaign was launched to raise $15,000 for Greff’s spiderweb. Over $20,000 was raised,
but, unable to secure the land, Greff switched gears and started building the knight. “I talked to the people who raised the funds and they said you’re better off doing something rather than nothing.” The majority of the funding for Greff’s sculptures comes from his own pocket, either from income generated by his gift shop or the hotel. He has also received grants and individual donations. In 2004, he received a $44,000 grant from the Bush Foundation. Though each of Greff’s seven sculptures are impressive, Geese in Flight has garnered the most attention. Visible from Interstate I-94, the piece stands 110 feet tall and 154 feet wide, weighing 157,659 pounds. The largest goose boasts a 30-foot wingspan. Geese in Flight was awarded a Guinness World Record for being the world’s largest salvaged metal sculpture. The statue depicts a skein of geese heading for the hills and flying off into the sunset. The building materials consist of used pipes and tanks from the nearby oil fields. Until 2001, the world’s largest salvaged metal sculpture was in Brazil, measuring 78 feet tall and weighing 49 tonnes. While assembling Geese in Flight, Greff realised that he had unintentionally broken a world record. “I didn’t plan on it, like welding”, said Greff, humbly, RAW VISION 95
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Give Us Barabbas, 1961, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 ins. / 101.6 x 152.4 cm
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FRANK BRUNO Visionary painter shares his apocalyptic prophecy FRED SCRUTON
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Blind Sheep, Easy, Easy Meat, 2000, oil on wood panel, 47 x 54 ins. / 119.4 x 137.2 cm
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“I
just want to get [God’s] message out”, Frank Bruno explained when we first met, “I don’t give a **** about anything else.” A veteran of World War II born in 1925, his website gives detailed explanations of his work (“I’m just a brush … God sends the work orders”) and offers scathing social commentary under the heading, “Would you like to see into the future?” Ideas for his mostly unsigned paintings, which he prefers to call “visuals”, “just pop into [his] head.” Usually dense with detail, there’s often no place for a signature. Besides, “why bother” when biblical prophecy reveals these to be the end times: “I believe it will be all over within the next 15 years … I’m a watchman warning of approaching danger, not some limp-wristed artist.” To Bruno, a “visual” hung for decoration constitutes an art object-ification of his message: he brought one back from a collector after it was displayed in the company of “crap”, and has painted duplicates of two others he’s hoping to eventually retrieve because “God told me not to sell”. Of the 60-odd paintings he has made in his lifetime, only one has been donated (to the American Visionary Art Museum) and a few early canvases aren’t hanging in a fire-rated out-building on his desert-valley property in southern Arizona. An asthmatic youth, Frank would stay inside his family’s Depression-era farmhouse and draw incessantly: filling paper scraps and washed-off butcher paper with sick-figure battle scenes. On Sundays, he was lured to church by his mother’s offerings of an occasional 10cent admission to the air-conditioned Saturday fantasies of the local movie theatre. One Sunday, his young polio-stricken friend, Billy, led him haltingly to the alter, and ten-year-old Bruno accepted Christ as his saviour. Months later, his father brought him to visit the now blind, disfigured and dying eleven-year-old, and he was dumbstruck to find Billy smiling serenely from the satisfaction of having saved several young souls. Bruno has come to understand that the directed purpose of his life’s work is to pass Billy’s gift of eternal life on to others. Teenage Frank had long dreamed of serving on the Navy ship named after his home state. He volunteered in 1941, presented an altered birth certificate and passed the gruelling day-long physical, but a sharp-eyed officer sent the 16-year-old home with a stern warning. Bruno cursed God throughout that sleepless night, but four
months later over 1,700 of the Battleship Arizona’s crew lay entombed in Pearl Harbor. He enlisted on his seventeenth birthday in 1942, sailed “three and a half times around the world” in four years, and was the temporary “proud owner” of a two-storey, bamboofloored “whorehouse” in the Philippines. Bruno tended bar after the war. “It was women and whiskey … one day, God decided enough fun and games for little Frankie, he has a job for me to do: quit bartending and go to art school.” Enticed by the sight of nude models, Bruno enrolled at Woodbury College in Los Angeles, and in 1950 he completed a four-year commercial art degree. While a friend who was studying fine art was encouraged to imitate mid-century Modernism, Bruno mastered the fundamentals of representational art, and, in retrospect, he’s sure God tempted him away from “feel good, I’m a rebel” art schools and “saved [him] as an artist.” Bruno returned to southern Arizona and worked on a freight railroad for nine years. The solitary job, and desert terrain “unchanged for thousands of years”, provided a “wilderness experience” that put earthly life into perspective: “it was Moses’ old finishing school.” Rails brought the warmth of sunlight into frigid evenings, and during thunderstorms, rattlesnakes would reach higher ground and heat by curling onto the tracks. For the brakemen seated low near the front, the rear-facing engine’s running lights would spotlight the rattlesnakes being pulverised – just as they fiercely struck at the suddenly onrushing locomotive. From the caboose, he would look up into the deep starry skies for hours while the train swayed and clicked hypnotically along. Bruno recalls being surrounded by thousands of kilometers of dark Indian Ocean on a blacked-out Navy ship, and becoming “spellbound” by the moonless sight of the Southern Cross constellation “like a veil [over the word of God] had been lifted.” Forty years later, his series of antediluvian zodiac paintings were partly inspired by these primordial visions. He went on to work as an Army, Navy, Air Force and Civil Defense illustrator in Washington DC and Arizona before settling into a single room of his mother’s hotel – eventually living alone in the 40-room establishment for more than a decade. In the early 1960s, Bruno worked briefly as a security guard in New York City where he painted an Asian island stage-set for the Ballet Arts, and his illustration portfolio brought several science-fiction magazine covers. But, disillusioned with the city and its art galleries, he returned to Arizona and completed a group of paintings that anticipated the decline of America and the 9/11 catastrophe. In Manhattan Hoe Down (1964), a percussive skyline explosion causes anal-dog-trumpets to release skull-andbone siren wails as dazed citizens wander aimlessly among grave markers that suggest fallen skyscrapers. In RAW VISION 95
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RIERA STUDIO Independent art space in Havana, Cuba SCOTT ROTHSTEIN
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he artists affiliated with the Riera Studio are creatively motivated for the most personal reasons. Their styles and sensibilities are diverse, yet all share an intense expressive focus. Until the establishment of the Riera Studio in 2012, these individuals were unknown and often living on the margins of Cuban society. While none have formal academic training, their art is robust, defined and compelling. Havana based artist Samuel Riera is the founder of the Riera Studio. This studio and workshop is Cuba’s first institution committed to art brut and outsider art. Unlike most Cuban arts organisations, Riera’s space is completely independent from the government and receives no official funding. Samuel Riera is a graduate of the Escuela Nacional de
Bellas Artes “San Alejandro”, where he studied printmaking. From 2010 to 2011, as part of a project in Venezuela, Riera worked with a foundation that helped people who were drug addicted, homeless or living in violent, poor neighbourhoods. This was a multidisciplinary programme that included psychologists, social workers, doctors and artists. Riera’s involvement exposed him to the possibilities of art-making outside of a formal academic setting. On his return to Cuba, Riera started his studio as a place that could present art not represented by government institutions. Over time, Riera came to understand that he was working with individuals who create art brut, and others who would be seen as outsider artists in the United States and Europe. The most recent artist discovered by the Riera Studio
Esperanza Conde, 2011, mixed media on panel, 45.3 x 54.3 ins. / 115 x 138 cm
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Carlos Javier Garcia Huergo, 2016, watercolour, pastel, coloured pencil and pen on cardboard, 28.3 x 19.7 ins. / 72 x 50 cm
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above: Isabel Aleman Corrales, 1987, tempera on paper, (left) 17 x 13.2 ins. / 43 x 33.5 cm; (right) 16.3 x 13.2 ins. / 41.5 x 33.5 cm
above: Ruben Gerardo Guerrero Garrido, 2015, coloured pencil on fibre paper, (left) 25.6 x 17.7 ins. / 65 x 45 cm; (right) 31.7 x 18.9 ins. / 80.5 x 48 cm
is Esperanza Conde, who lives with her family in the remote countryside of Villa Clara. Conde, known to her friends as Pia, is a self-taught artist who feels compelled to paint. She has spent her entire life in an isolated, rural setting living simply off the land, yet her art is sophisticated and confident. Conde’s work is energised with colour and figures that bring vitality to the surface of paintings, and she passionately explores the human psychological condition in her art. While pursuing his graduate studies in Czechoslovakia, mathematician Carlos Javier Garcia Huergo began to experience extreme behavioural changes. Following the onset of schizophrenia, he developed an interest in drawing. His art is elaborate, and rendered with a gentle hand. Numbers, words, human figures and animals are assembled on cardboard surfaces as if Huergo is 54
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illustrating a dream or fantasy. A mathematician expressing himself through art, Huergo has found a way to transform a cerebral experience into a visual format that is both thought provoking and unexpected. Born in 1915, Isabel Aleman Corrales was a schoolteacher who retired due to vocal problems. Without any formal training, she began to paint in 1960. Her tempera paintings read abstract at first glance, yet in almost all the works Corrales positions eyes within her organic forms. Corrales’s art has been loaned to the Studio to be studied and exhibited. There is a visceral power seen in her uninhibited and direct painting style that resonates on the page, creating intriguing and rarefied moments. Religion informs the art of Ruben Gerardo Guerrero Garrido. Following a profound personal tragedy as a
Miguel Ramon Morales Diaz, (above) 2016, coloured pencil, graphite and crayon on cardboard, 15.4 x 20.5 ins. / 39 x 52 cm; (below) 2017, graphite and coloured pencil on cardboard, 11.8 x 15.7 ins. / 30 x 40 cm
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BRIGHT, DARK LIGHT Thickets of inky lines with luminous blacks and browns reflect Beverly Baker’s ambitious, creative spirit EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
Photos of artworks courtesy of Institute 193, Lexington, KY
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raditionally, how artists transform their materials, the themes they choose to explore and the messages they convey through their creations are some of the essential aspects that shape their respective bodies of work. Together, they help express a particular art-maker’s philosophical, political, aesthetic or other vision. But what can – or should – viewers in search of meaning in art (for some, a clear sense of an artist’s intentions serves as an anchor of understanding) make of abstract works whose ambiguity can be as puzzling as it is compelling? Although that theme has been kicking around for more than a century in mainstream modern-art circles, in which artists informed by their knowledge of academic art history have produced abstract works in dialogue with 58
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Untitled, 2015, ballpoint pen on paper, 19.5 x 25.5 ins. / 49.5 cm
it, that question has not really been a concern of artmakers in the related art brut, outsider art and self-taught art fields who have worked in abstract modes. For those artists, their natural, unfettered impulse to do so has not come from theory-fuelled starting points. With this in mind, the distinctive works on paper of the self-taught American artist Beverly Baker, which lately have been earning considerable critical praise, feel all the more singular and alluring. Baker was born with Down’s syndrome in 1961, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky, in the east-central part of the United States. Lexington lies at the heart of the Bluegrass region, which has long been known as a centre of Thoroughbred horse-breeding. For many years, Baker, who began making art at an early age, has participated in the art-studio programme at Latitude
Untitled, 2015, ballpoint pen on paper, 11.25 x 16.75 ins. / 28.6 x 42.5 cm
Artist Community (also known as “Latitude Arts”), a facility founded in Lexington in 2001, primarily to serve people with disabilities. A few months ago, Institute 193, an independent, notfor-profit arts centre in Lexington, working in collaboration with Latitude Arts, presented an exhibition of Baker’s works. Earlier this summer, a version of that same small survey went on view at LAND (League Artist Natural Design), an art-making workshop for disabled people in Brooklyn, New York. In both of these shows, the labour-intensive, even obsessive character of Baker’s artmaking technique and the richness of her finished drawings were evident. Bruce Burris, an artist who co-founded Latitude Arts with Crystal Bader-Webster, recalled in a recent telephone
interview from his current home in Oregon that, prior to joining the Lexington facility’s art studio, Baker had taken part in another social-services agency’s programme whose practices he found to be “troubling”. “At the time, Beverly, who is mostly non-verbal, was living at home with her parents”, Burris said. “One day I stopped by that other place and noticed a young woman drawing with a ballpoint pen on scraps she had rescued from a paper shredder. It was Beverly. Her designated task was to shred all sorts of confidential papers she had been given from that social-service agency’s office. But it was clear that she was making art, and that no one was helping her to do something creative like that. She had taken the initiative to change the dynamic of her situation, but no one was encouraging her or even aware of her effort.” RAW VISION 95
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Burris was able to bring Baker into the new, artfocused programme he and Bader were setting up. “The motivating idea in social services is that we’re supposed to support the interests of the people we serve”, Burris explained. Even Baker’s parents did not understand that Beverly’s “scribbling” was, in fact, a form of artistic expression offering their daughter a deeply personal way of communicating. Burris encouraged them to stop throwing away Beverly’s drawings. In Paris, Maïa Ferrari studied at the École du Louvre and worked at the Fondation Dubuffet (the organisation that catalogues Jean Dubuffet’s works and preserves his 60
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artistic legacy) before moving to the United States. She is now the creative director of Institute 193, whose curatorial and educational activities, and related publishing programme focus on the art, music, and culture of the American Southeast. She said, “Baker’s works had not been shown publicly here in her home state for more than a decade, and we felt strongly that they deserved to be seen again.” That interest in Baker’s work led to the art centre’s recent exhibition. Like Phillip March Jones, Institute 193’s founder, Ferrari pointed out that Baker’s concentrated use of ballpoint pens to make her drawings echoes that of other
Untitled, 2016, ballpoint pen on paper, 15 x 22 ins. / 38.1 x 55.9 cm
Beverly Baker at work in the art studio, 2007, photo: Phillip March Jones
contemporary self-taught artists, such as the American Dan Miller or the Japanese Yuichi Saito, both of whom have also created remarkably dynamic compositions with little more than ballpoint, felt-tip or gel pens on paper. (Similarly, in England, the self-taught artist Nigel Kingsbury, who died last year, produced voluminous images of elegant women using only pencils on paper; his compositions were made up of nearly sculptural passages of energetic, wiry strokes.) Admirers of classic modern art might recognise in Baker’s dark, monumental-feeling, silhouetted forms, which often fill nearly all of the sheets on which they are
drawn, unwitting affinities to the black, oil-stick-on-paper, abstract drawings of the American artist Richard Serra (b. 1938), which are formally related to his massive, steelplate sculptures. Baker’s all-over, mark-filled abstractions also call to mind a strain of minimalist drawing that can be found in Japan; it is evident in some of the works of the Japanese artist Takesada Matsutani (b. 1937), who uses plain graphite strokes to meticulously and completely cover large sheets of paper or expanses of canvas. In Baker’s pictures, looks can be deceiving; what at first glance, from a short distance, might appear to be RAW VISION 95
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EXHIBITIONS
Aloise Corbaz and Judith Scott Georges Liautaud photos: Mitch Osbourne and Peter Whyte
THE MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) Hobart, Tasmania, Australia June 10, 2016 – April 2, 2018 After an exhilarated journey through thirty rooms and many corridors of remarkable images and objects made by over 200 artists, any visitor to The Museum of Everything in Hobart will have been challenged to reassess their preconceptions about why human beings are compelled to give visual form to their understanding of the world they inhabit. Finally, you arrive in a backyard courtyard, entered through a fly-wire screen door. Painted on the wall is a call-out for more people who might be included in some future exhibition. It asks, are you a self-taught or secret artist? Is your home your own personal gallery? Have you invented a private language? If so contact The Museum of Everything. Inspired by remarkable work produced by men and women for whom the act of creation is fundamental to their existence many have struggled to find a way to explain who they are and what they do. Whatever category assigned them, and none is 64
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entirely satisfactory, the artists whose works adorn the walls are clearly extraordinary! The great challenge of this exhibition is to learn to look and to receive the wonders presented to us, to lift the filters we normally have in place in an art gallery and look intensely at works that break rules, disrupt expectations and offer us insights into the lives of remarkable human beings. Each of these artists has remade their world through a physical engagement with the tools of art, and because of that, we have a window into some remarkable personal narratives. In 2007 I had the opportunity to meet Stan Hopewell, who is represented in this exhibition by his masterwork ‘The Last Supper.' Like others compelled to make images that try to answer the big questions and confront the crucial problems in life, the task appeared so great and so necessary and so profound that to embark on it Stan required divine guidance. Hopewell’s is but one of the inspiring human stories from the vast array that lie behind the over 2000 objects hung throughout the temporary gallery space of MoNA. Of course, they add a dimension to our reading of the works,
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EXHIBITIONS
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Whence This Flame I See?, 1954, oil on fibreboard
MYTHOLOGIES: EUGENE VON BRUENCHENHEIN John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 608 New York Ave, Sheboygan, WI 53081. June 25, 2017 – January 14, 2018 After the American self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) died, and his vast body of work came to the attention of museum officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in whose suburbs he had long resided, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in nearby Sheboygan acquired the bulk of his remarkable oeuvre. After conserving and cataloguing it, JMKAC presented a first Von Bruenchenhein exhibition in 1984. Since then, examples of the artist’s diverse creations – abstract and semi-abstract paintings; stylised, often semi-nude girlie photos of his wife, Marie; handmade, coloured ceramics; and sculptures made with painted chicken bones – have turned up frequently in group shows and at art fairs, and in occasional, solo gallery presentations. Now, as part of a series of exhibitions celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, JMKAC has organised the most comprehensive Von Bruenchenhein survey ever. Featuring definitive examples of all aspects of the artist’s production, it allows viewers to clearly comprehend the ideas and life circumstances that informed his general worldview and, more specifically, his aesthetic vision. A revelation is a section of the exhibition featuring Von 66
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Bruenchenhein’s paintings in oil on fibreboard of hydrogenbomb mushroom clouds, some incorporating demonic faces, and audio recordings of his own readings of his statements about war and humanity’s follies in the Cold War era. Also noteworthy: his paintings of high-rise “towers” on cardboard or Masonite from the 1970s and 1980s, his photo albums and poetic writings, and the diversity of his delicate ceramic crowns and vessels. Von Bruenchenhein’s sense of himself as an artist, his interest in vegetal and architectonic forms, and Marie’s role as his muse and queen of their shared fantasy world emerge powerfully in this big show. Von Bruenchenhein worked in a commercial bakery until the late 1950s; for decades, though, he and Marie lived in poverty. Still, through art they created in their home a realm of imagined royalty and larger-than-life self-expression. Isolated, unrecognised, and eccentric, Von Bruenchenhein identified himself as a “Freelance Artist”, a “Poet and Sculptor”, and an “Arrow maker and Plant man”, among other roles. In one of his introspective, handwritten texts, the originals of which are on display, he wrote, “I work on my art as a jeweler works, painfully and gust [sic]. Precise to an end result, close as I can get to perfection.” Elsewhere he once noted, “I am from another world. I always felt so.” Edward M. Gómez
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BOOKS
BRUCE NEW: The Night is Only a Dream Morehead State University, Kentucky, 2017, no ISBN.
AMERICAN SITES: Art Environment Photography by Fred Scruton Catalogue of exhibition at JM Kohler Arts Center, 2017, no ISBN. Raw Vision readers will be familiar with Fred Scruton’ s photographs of sites from Juanita Leonard, to Charles Smith and Prophet Isaiah Robertson. This collection reaffirms Scruton as one of America’s great documenters of a unique art form that manifests itself right across the nation. There are new discoveries such as the bizarre interiors of Charles Wince’s Winceworld and houses like Casey Marquez’s Casa de Colores in NM contrasting with well researched huge exterior constructions such as Billy Trip’s Mindfield and Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain.
STAY HOME: Take a tip from one who’s traveled, never start to rambling ‘round By Max Kuhn, 2017, no ISBN, edition of 300, max-kuhn.com After two years on the road around the US, living a life of a latter-day hobo, Max Kuhn recounts his experiences and the people he came across in sound and vision in this box of book, cards and, unusually these days, a casette tape with interviews with the artist and his family. Kuhn is also an unlicensed tattooist and his autobiographical drawings reproduced here have more than a touch of tattoo flash about them. He assembled his work in a mixed media presentation to try and explain to himself his compulsion to keep going off on the road, following in his father’s footsteps. He explains “ I have this strong desire to leave. I can’t tell if it it’s for a sense of adventure or if it’s being a runaway - just wanting to get out.” 68
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With an introduction by Jay Wehnert this exhibition catalogue from Moorhead State gives a comprehensive overview of Bruce New’s work from his early paintings with acrylic mixed with coffee grounds to the later mixed media collages that he became well known for. His later work incorporates a brighter range of colour and use of photo montage.
HENRIETTE ZÉPHIR Exhibition catalogue, Collection de L’Art Brut, Lausanne, 2017, 45 pp. A spiritual medium and occultist, Zephir met Jean Dubuffet in 1966 and he subsequently acquired her work for his collection. This little book surveys the different stages of her work, from complex geometrics to the glowing circular motifs of her later colourful drawings.
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SACRED GEOMETRY OF NATURE: Journey on the Path of the Divine Francene Hart, Bear & Company, 2017, ISBN: 978 15 91432739 An autobiographical journey through time and to spiritual places around the world that inspired artist Francene Hart. Her response is a series of spiritualist meditative paintings derived from such sites as stone circles and pyramids, travels to Central America, Asia and Europe, and from sacred geometry and spirit guides.
BOOKS
GORZKI SMAK - THE BITTER TASTE: Art Brut in Poland at the turn of 21C Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw, 2016 ISBN: 978 83 88654 82 4 Text in English and Polish
PICTURES SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS: 25 Years of Galerie Atelier Herenplaats Rotterdam – Outsider Art in The Netherlands Trichis, 2017, ISBN: 978 94 92077 868
Following an essay on the historical and national aspects of Art Brut, the book presents over 30 Polish artists with biographies and examples of work. Well known figures include Edmund Monsiel and Stanislaw Zagajewski but there are many more to discover here.
Galerie Atelier Herenplaats is one of Europe’s leading studios for artists with developmental difficulties and this large book celebrates 25 years of its creative activities. Interspersed between pages of documentation of the Herenplaats artists are chronological pages that survey each year’s activities at the studios and present information about figures from the greater world of Outsider Art who have been influential or supportive such as collectors Max Ammann and James Brett and others such as Lisa Inckmann from Kunsthaus Kannen. The main impetus of this highly recommended volume are all the many artists who have been involved with Herenplaats over the years. Some like Paulus De Groot, Ben Augustus or Hein Dingemans have become well known and are included in reputable collections around Europe while there are so many others who remain to be discovered and studied more fully. The variety of work from the Atelier is remarkable and typically has no common style or technique but reflects the highly contrasting personalities and expressions of the differing creators, from minutely detailed drawings to powerful figurative painting. Some works are gathered together in sections such as Eroticism, Religion or Transport, but this is a celebration of the great variety and individual visions of the different artists involved with Herenplaats over the years and who have helped to make it such a vibrant and important institution.
THE PHOTOGRAPH ALBUMS OF JEAN DUBUFFET Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, 2017, 820 pp, ISBN: 978 88 7439 796 9 Part of the ongoing documentation of Dubuffet’s research into Art Brut, the book combines fourteen albums totalling over 900 photographs of works collected or photographed by Dubuffet between 1948 and 1970. Not everything was ultimately included in the collection but the careful and respectful documentation of expressions that were completely ignored at the time included police photographs of tattooed suspects, Swiss folk masks and Brassai’s photographs of etched graffiti as well Dr Morgenthaler’s original collection of Adolf Wölfli drawings.