la tinaïa
arte irregolare
For more than 30 years, La Tinaia - the expression centre of the San Salvi psychiatric hospital in Florence - was, until its recent closure, the transalpine capital of “irregular art”, the Italian variant of Art Brut.
Created in 1975 by Massimo Mensi in the wake of anti-institutional experiments - known in France as anti-psychiatry - Tinaia was more an experience of community life where creation played a key role than an art therapy workshop as we understand it today. Isn’t the Tinaia - the “cellar” in Tuscany - the place where the grapes are pressed and the wine matures? Together with the Gugging Centre in Austria, the Tinaia Centre was the only institutional workshop to be honoured in 1992 with a presentation in the Art Brut books.
A rare opportunity, therefore, to (re)discover these great creators such as Galli, Gelli, Pastore, Raugei and Ulivieri whose works are present in collections all over the world.
Marco Raugei grew up in a poor, working class family and was often bullied and beaten by his three brothers and sisters. He attended school for five years before being placed in a range of specialized institutions. In 1986, he enrolled at La Tinaia, an arts program associated with the San Salvi psychiatric hospital in Florence. After two years spent wandering the room and speaking to himself, he began to draw. His drawings, made with black felt pen on large format sheets, show repeated objects or figures from his daily life: animals, characters, and constructions are aligned horizontally, stopping when the sheet has been filled. Although nearly identical, the subjects in a single work,[…]