YIA

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).

More than twenty years ago, Harald Stoffers began a fictional correspondence with his mother, in which all the letters started with “Liebe Mutti.” He began this exercise at a workshop for people with disabilities where he worked. He began by distributing them among his fellow workers as small torn notes. Presented in a film by Youssef Tabti at the Grand Palais in 2009, his work was included in institutions as the Mona (Australia), the Hamburger Bahnhof—National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Berlin), the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin), Galerie der Villa (Hamburg), l’Oliva Creative Factory (Portugal), le Dox Art Center (Prague), and the Maison rouge (Paris). A significant number of his works were donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

The Uruguayan gardener, Alexandro García, began to transcribe his ethereal visions following an encounter of the third kind - or avistamiento - that he experienced as a child. Worthy heir to magical realism, however, he goes beyond its scope: he speaks to us of an elsewhere offered to our projections and to the colonization of a new humanity through inhabited and saturated architectures. Present notably in the abcd/Bruno Decharme collection (France), his work was shown in the exhibition Elévations in 2015, co-curated by Antoine de Galbert, and tribute to the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a fairy tale palace built by the postman Ferdinand Cheval in 1879.

Bellucci attended the Blu Cammello workshop in Livorno, where he was brought to light by the artist Riccardo Bargellini. His hybrid sculptures, born from the assemblage of eclectic objects, form a mysterious language where destinies intertwine and echo one another, seen through the lens of transition, fetishism, or the apotropaic.
His works, part of the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Pompidou) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, have been showcased in numerous major exhibitions, notably at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
“These works are endowed with a symbolic power that many ‘professional’ artists are incapable of achieving. “(P. Dagen, Le Monde)

This Californian artist, who died in 2010, had a degree in chemical engineering. Fascinated by meditation and metaphysics, he sought to unravel the mysteries of existence through formulas and numbers drawn from his own history. This “conceptual brut” artist sometimes photocopied his work to distribute it to as many people as possible. In 2014, Daniel Baumann introduced him to the 548 Center in New York. The following year, we entrusted Gael Charbau with writing an essay and curing the monographic exhibition held at the gallery. In the same year, Alfred
A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.