voir l’invisible

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).

Born in Poland in 1897, Edmund Monsiel left school without a diploma and opened a small village store that the Germans took over in 1942. He took refuge at his brother’s home in Wozuczyn, a small city in the Lubin province, convinced that the Nazis were after him, and remained hidden in the attic for 20 years, until his death. In 1943, at the peak of the war, he began to draw. It was not until after his death that some 500 of his creations were found, “inspired” by traditional, popular and religious iconography. Myriads of faces cover the entirety of the page, obsessively repeated. The smallest ones are difficult to distinguish; sometimes, up to 3000 figures are represented in the same[…]

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 have been presented at the Venice Biennale for the second time, under the curatorship of Adriano Pedrosa.