Madge Gill

The drawings Madge Gill produces in the darkness of her attic tirelessly represent a female figure, always similar, magnified, sumptuously dressed, evolving in an unreal world with grandiose and maze-like, improbable architecture. Time and space appear to have been abolished, as if suspended, and yet, an insistent vitality powerfully animates the black ink, transcends paper and fabric, and tells us a story.

An illegitimate child, Madge Gill, born in 1882 in London, is first hidden by her mother and aunt, then placed in an orphanage at the age of nine. Sent to Canada to work on a farm, she returns to Great Britain at the age of nineteen, becomes a nurse, and marries her cousin, of whom she has three sons. The second son died and the following year, in 1919, she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. These trials plunge Gill into a long illness resulting in her losing the sight of her left eye. As her aunt initiates her into spiritualism, she devotes herself to painting.

Working very quickly, for whole nights, by candlelight, in a state close to trance, this hypersensitive and reserved woman refuses to sell her works, which she believes belong to her guiding spirit Myrninerest (my innerest, “my most intimate”). Her drawings range from banners reaching dozens of meters to postcards and intermediate formats, all worked with pen and black ink with a few rare chromatic deviations.
It was only after she died in 1961 that hundreds of drawings were found in her home, stacked in closets or under the beds.

A key figure in art brut fascinating Jean Dubuffet, Roger Cardinal, Michel Thévoz, and many others, Madge Gill’s masterful work is represented in the world’s most important collections of art brut.