otherworldly :

After a troubled childhood and a turbulent adolescence, August Walla was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was finally admitted - along with his mother - to the Gugging hospital, near Vienna, in 1970. Resident of the Haus der Künstler (house of artists), he will remain there for the rest of his life. Expressing himself through photography, installation, diversion of objects and typing of manifestos, writing and drawing have become inseparable in his work. A key figure in art brut, collected by David Bowie, Walla is present in a number of collections around the world, including those of the MoMa (New York) or the Milwaukee Art Museum (Wisconsin).

O.T. - as he signed - was an emblematic artist of the Gugging hospital, where he was interned because of the psychosis he began to suffer upon returning from the siege of Stalingrad. His drawings, antitheses of the horror vacui, are characterized by their minimalism, the purity, the economy of means and effects, the sense of balance and space. Admired by Michel Thévoz, who devoted several feature articles to him, he also fascinated David Bowie and Brian Eno, who met and collected him. His works can be found in countless collections, such as those of Arnulf Rainer (Austria), abcd/Bruno Decharme (France) or the Pinacothèque Hervé Lancelin (Luxembourg).

He is the most widely exhibited and published living art brut artist, yet the extraordinary trajectory of this Frenchman raises a question that is rarely addressed: that of the impermanence of art brut. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet at a time when he was working on the resurgence of the symbolic body, he allowed himself to become the protean artist we know and who, in his creation, embodies absolute freedom. His work can be found in countless collections, and he was the first artist of art brut to enter the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Pompidou). Exhibited at the Monnaie de Paris, the Albertina Museum and the Mona, Michel Nedjar has been the subject of nine monographic exhibitions.

A former US Air Force technician, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in his thirties. In his case, it manifests as an eidetic memory that allows him to bring a wealth of numerical data relating to his favourite subjects to the surface of his works. Time, magic squares, the Titanic and imaginary megacities are among the recurring themes of his drawings. His work is held in collections including those of the Smithsonian (Washington) and the Centre Pompidou (France), and has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in the cult exhibition Le Bord des mondes, in An Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery in London, and at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
He is also profiled in the documentary La Folie art brut, broadcast on Arte.

Leopold Strobl has been part of Gugging (Austria) for the last ten years, finding comfort and redemption in art, a way of holding his mental demons off. He draws with colored pencil on small-format. Crafted on landscape photographs found in newspapers, his drawings are similar to magnetic portals. Strobl is part of the Museum Of Modern Art (New York) collections since 2018, his work was presented the following year in the exhibition Photo | Brut at the Rencontres d’Arles. In 2024, his works were presented at the Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.