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Curated by Lucienne Peiry, fourteen Art Brut artists, from the 19th century to the present day, are presented through creations that explore the immaterial, death, and the afterlife.

From Germany, China, the United States, France, Ghana, Indonesia, Italy, New Guinea, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic, these creators express existential and metaphysical questions through a great diversity of forms. Solitary and nonconformist, they find little place within their communities and often see their only purpose in life through self-taught and unconventional artistic creation. Their paintings, drawings, sculptures, and embroideries are, by nature, works that open doors to otherness and the invisible.

Among the artists presented: Guo Fengyi, Anna Zemankova, August Walla, JB Murray…

Artists
august walla - © mario del curto, christian berst — art brut

August Walla

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).

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Edmund Monsiel - © christian berst — art brut

Edmund Monsiel

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[…]

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Guo Fengyi - © christian berst — art brut

Guo Fengyi

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 .

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anna zemankova - © christian berst — art brut

Anna Zemánková

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 outsider art, 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.

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voir l’invisible

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