Art Spirite, Mediumnique, Visionnaire

The works of Madge Gill, a mediumistic artist from the mid-20th century, were collected by Jean Dubuffet. Guided by a spirit and in a trance state, Madge Gill drew in ink on surfaces ranging from small formats to rolls of over a hundred meters. Her entire body of work was only discovered after she died in 1961. Today considered a key figure in art brut, her works can be found in major European and North American collections: American Folk Art Museum (New York, USA), the Museum of Everything (UK), Arnulf Rainer Collection (Austria), Damman (Switzerland), Treger Saint Silvestre (Portugal), etc. Her works were presented at the Venice Biennale in 2024 curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Augustin Lesage was born in 1876 in Brittany to a family of miners. At the age of fourteen he went to work in the mines, where, in 1911, “(he) heard a voice that said clearly, ‘one day you will be a painter.’” Afraid of being considered mentally unstable, he kept this revelation to himself and began to explore spiritualism. During one seance, a message conveyed by spirits confirmed his artistic calling. Under their instruction, he made nonrepresentational drawings of spiral shapes in colored pencil. The spirits would soon tell Lesage to set his pencils aside and to work with oil paint instead. The miner followed their orders. His first canvas was very large, at 3m², revealed a new style,[…]

A mediumistic artist, Raphael Lonné only started to draw in 1950, during a spiritualism session. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet a decade later, he is now considered a classic of this particular category of art brut: spiritual artists. Raphael Lonné has experimented with various techniques, from graphite to ink to watercolor. He mainly draws small formats on paper. Present in many collections, such as those of the American Folk Art Museum (USA) or the LaM (France), and Centro de Arte Oliva (Portugal) he was part of the traveling exhibition Inner Worlds Outside in 2006, alongside Miro, Kandinsky, and Picabia.

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that this humble Moravian woman began creating works, strikingly responding to impulses from the depths. At dawn, she would mentally gather flowers “that grow nowhere else,” making them emerge from the paper.
Anna Zemánková is an established figure of art brut, to the point that she was honored in 2013 at the Venice Biennale before a significant collection of her works joined the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Mumok.
In 2023, the gallery presented her in a solo show at Art Basel Paris, and the following year Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the Venice Biennale, exhibited a group of her works. In 2026, the Hermès Corporate Foundation in Brussels subsequently presented eight of her drawings.

Marguerite Burnat-Provins was born into a wealthy and cultured family. Encouraged by her father, she became involved in writing and painting from an early age and received artistic training in Paris. Married to a Swiss architect, she painted and wrote, but divorced in 1906 to marry a young engineer. The couple was living in Bayonne when the First World War broke out. Already in fragile health, the war caused her such a shock that it led her to create a series of unprecedented pictorial works entitled My City (“Ma ville”). Marguerite drew and painted as if taking dictation, while suffering from hallucinations. “I undergo them, I feel them coming by hunching my shoulders, and I cannot help[…]