the danaids

Born in 1938 in Kirchau (Austria), Reisenbauer arrived at the Gugging when, shortly after his years in high school, he was diagnosed with psychosis. After 30 years of hospitalization in a pavilion for chronic illness, he was invited, in 1986, to come live at the Gugging House of Artists near Vienna. His drawings, most often small and drawn with black and colored pencils, invariably offer an almost serigraphic repetition of a subject that varies in miniscule details. He displays the same obsessive concern for order and balance in the most trivial daily tasks. Thus, when he is charged with the distribution of fruit to the residents of the Maison, the exercise is transformed into a veritable[…]

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.

Jill Gallieni is as discreet and mysterious as are the prayers she lays on paper. Indeed, these prayers can only be addressed to the saints they invoke, for they are intentionally rendered unreadable. Cryptic writing par excellence, where absence is made visible, her work plunges us into a deep anchorite universe. For more than 10 years, the gallery has represented this French artist, whose works are as well part of major European collections of art brut such as that of the Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou), the Museum of LaM (France), of art brut in Lausanne (Switzerland) or even of the Hannah Rieger collection (Austria).

Masaki Mori discovered 4’33”, John Cage’s masterpiece during his studies. He then became interested in experimental music, which led him to produce drawings in order to visualize musical space. His “Gig” series expresses the visual image of postmodern, deconstructed music, represented among others by John Zorn. He solves the existential anguish caused by his long struggle with illness through drawing.

A member of the Yamanami workshop (Shiga, Japan) since 2015, Momoko Nakagawa has been doing, in a broad and regular gesture, a serial and calibrated work on writing, moving from the undulating of colored frequencies to stamping numbers in coffee halos. Evoking lyrical abstraction, the young artist’s work “combines gestural spontaneity, calligraphic elegance, serialized repetition, and formal inventiveness,” as Raphael Koenig writes in the dossier devoted to her by Artpress (2020). Her work was exhibited for the first time in 2019 at Harvard University, and then, that same year, at the gallery as part of the choral exhibition japon brut: la lune, le soleil, yamanami. In 2019, Momoko Nakagawa receives the Art Absolument Award for Outsider Art.