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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).

A poor child of Mississippi condemned to the hardest work, this African-American woman began, at the dawn of her life, a work that resembles a real graphic blues. Mary T. Smith gave shape to her personal cosmology by painting on sheets of corrugated iron and wooden panels
arranged around her house. Her “solar aesthetic”—says Daniel Soutif—and her powerfully elementary modes of representation made a strong impression on Jean‑Michel Basquiat. Now considered an emblematic figure of American art brut, her works have been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) collections.

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 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.

Born in Switzerland into a prosperous family, Louis Soutter studied engineering and architecture. He also paints and plays the violin. In 1897, Soutter moved to the United States where he was appointed head of the Department of Art and Design at Colorado College. But in 1903, severely depressed, he abandoned his family and career to return to Switzerland and began a musical career. Twenty years later, at the age of 52, having become destitute, he was interned in a hospice for the elderly in the canton of Vaud, where he spent the last 20 years of his life. It was there that his artistic production, until then relatively academic, changed completely. Using rudimentary means, he paints[…]

Judith Scott was born with a Down Syndrome into a middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. Following an attack of Scarlet Fever in infancy, she lost her hearing, although this would not be recognized until many years later. She spent the first 7 years of her life in her home and with her twin sister before she was sent in an institution for handicap children. She lived 35 years separated from her family, until in 1986, her twin sister became her legal tutor and moved with her in California. Judith got into the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, where after two years, she starts producing original sculptures by collecting diverse objects, from all size and shape. She would wrap them,[…]