Chrysalis:

Janko Domsic was, among many other things, a demiurge, a builder, an organizer, and an artist. It was in his makeshift dormitory not far from the Montmartre cemetery, in Paris, that this Croatian exile made his celestial compositions, filled with religious political and Masonic symbols. “My writings are coded.” His drawings, like the texts that accompany them, respond to a very elaborate system. Magnified in the exhibition Art brut, works of the Antoine de Galbert collection, in 2015, at the maison rouge (Paris), his pieces appear in all the major world collections, both public and private, of art brut.

Living her spirituality along the paths of Qi-gong, it was at the dawn of her 40th birthday that Guo Fengyi began to reinterpret popular Chinese beliefs in ink and brush drawings. On rolls of rice paper, sometimes measuring up to 10 meters, entities unfold.
Sometimes akin to The Pantheon, sometimes to pandemonium, they seem to float in a space-time void. These heretical scrolls were exhibited at the 55thVenice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and in 2023, during the exhibition Chrysalide : le rêve du papillon at the Center of Contemporary Art of Genève .

It was in the early 1960s that this humble Moravian woman began producing a body of work for which her background had not prepared her, responding strikingly to impulses from deep within. Thus, at a time when the demons of the night still contended with the seminal hues of dawn, she would, in her mind, pick strange flowers and bring them to life on paper. Anna Zemánková is now a well-established figure in Art Brut, to the point that she was honored at the Venice Biennale in 2013, before a significant collection of her works was acquired by the Centre Pompidou, followed by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. In 2024, her works will be presented at the Venice Biennale for the second time, under the curatorship of Adriano Pedrosa.

Tomasz Machciński (1942–2022), a war orphan and Polish laborer, dedicated 50 years of his life to creating over 22,000 photographic self-portraits. Ten years before Cindy Sherman, Machciński embarked on an intense quest for identity. Recently discovered, this monumental work has been acclaimed at the Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the Independent Art Fair in New York.

• According to the artist’s wishes and in agreement with the Machciński Foundation, only 2,500 photographs from the estate will eventually be available for sale.