Marginal art is placed at the center of great museums | Culture – Explica

In the white of Ceija Stojkas eye (Kraubath an der Mur, 1933-Vienna, 2013) one can look out into the abysses of horror. The gloomy barbed wire, the chimneys spitting their black smoke, the crow that predicts the worst omen. That same eye has been reflected in one of the artists paintings, which also attempted to shake off the pain by means of long autobiographical texts in which she described the passage from a nomadic and happy life to an existence chained by torture. Born into a Roma family, Stojka lived to tell about Nazi terror. Out of a 200-member clan, only she, her mother, and four of her five brothers miraculously managed to shake off the extermination. The testimony of this creator, the writing and the one represented in tables of energetic, overwhelming invoice, has been substantial for the subsequent revision of the Holocaust beyond the Jewish people.

Stojkas work is perceived today as canonical even though she never received any training. He had no teachers, no patrons, no career in the most solemn sense of the term: when he started painting he was 56 years old and had raised three children. Her first brushes were her bare fingers. Your own intuitions, your guide. Formerly situated on the obverse of that hazy notion of official culture, the work of the gypsy artist is now celebrated with the highest honors: the Museo Reina Sofa presents her first retrospective in Spain, Esto ha passo, which will remain open between 22 November and March 23, 2020.

Stojka, who passed through the fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrck and Bergen-Belsen, is not the only marginal artist who has made a name for herself on mainstream circuits. The Casa Encendida (LCE) in Madrid hosts until January 5, 2020 The Electric Eye, a collective curated by Antonia Gaeta and Pilar Soler that brings together works by 41 of these so-called outsider painters from the early 20th century to the present day: mentally ill , spiritualists, enlightened and solitary instructed by themselves who, in their radical difference, share imaginary that encompasses authentic cosmogony, wonderful worlds full of magical and revealing elements. Marginal art is a term that could make sense at the time, but now I am against its use, says Soler, who places the moment of full integration of these creators at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where they were exposed pieces by Guo Fengyi, Anna Zemnkov, Augustin Lesage and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, all present at the LCE exhibition, where names such as that of todays renowned Swiss painter Adolf Wlfli also stand out.

Austrian artist Ceija Stojka. christa schnepf

Intellectuals began to take an interest in these artists in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when there was a crisis of rationalism, says Commissioner Soler, who raves about the return to the same reasons to explain the renewed attention for these artists. Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist, published Expressions of Madness: The Art of the Mentally Ill in 1922, a compilation of paintings by patients that fascinated the forefront of Eluard, Picasso and Klee. In 1945, after Hitlers presentation of his Degenerate Art exhibition with pieces of lunatics (his intention was to propagate his idea of moral decadence), the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut to refer to the plastic devised by madmen . The designation was later extended with the notion of marginal or outsider to other types of exotic or naive creators, who in Spain find one of their greatest exponents in the figure of the Catalan peasant and fortune-teller Josefa Tolr (1880- 1959), whose esoteric and clairvoyant painting, which at the time powerfully attracted the attention of the artists of Dau to the set, is preserved today in museums such as MACBA or Reina Sofa.

Dubuffet demonstrates that there are other perspectives beyond the European and the normative: there are also children, the marginalized, even women, issues that today have been extended to more open postcolonial visions, which take into account the racial minorities , illustrates Jos Miguel Garca Corts, director of the IVAM in Valencia, which until February 16, 2020 exhibits a selection of pieces by the French sculptor and painter under the title A barbarian in Europe. Like Soler, Garca Corts insists that talking about brut or marginal art in our time lacks the meaning it once had. Art does not have to be in a drawer, he says. I am reluctant to put labels. The question about the legitimacy and the growing disaffection with such a classification was already being asked by Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofa, in the presentation in 2010 for the first time in a museum of contemporary art of an anthology of the Mexican journeyman Martn Ramrez (Tepatitln, 1895-Auburn, 1963), self-taught incarcerated much of his life in American sanitariums. What theoretical and conceptual turns will the presentation of the work provoke in this framework? Is his art better understood in relation to underground channels that exceptionally have become, for this institution, main stories destined to answer the dominant? .

French sculptor and painter Jean Dubuffet.

Artists such as those that make up Under the hat, a collective made up of people with intellectual disabilities, currently reaffirm the closing of the gap between the creative spaces that once delimited the center and the periphery. Andrs Fernndez, one of the members of the group, exhibits these days his work in the collective (D) writing the world. Approaches to language and knowledge, open until February 12, 2020 at the MUSAC in Len. The margins are always very diffuse, there is no clear border, says the director of the institution and curator of the exhibition, Manuel Olveira, who also stresses that he refuses to resort to the prejudice of the categories.

People like Fernndez or [la poeta] Mareva Mayo are at MUSAC because they are artists. Their work is good: it is born from an inner world that pushes them, and that they execute with high doses of freedom, without being subject to rules , concludes Olveira. If this creative impulse detached from trends remains one of the few qualities that continues to make a difference for these creators, another could be a certain disconnection from the market: while some of the historical names are already an integral part of the economic fabric of the industry (As Soler says, Adolf Wlfi is already a totem), other modern ones, like Fernndez, although they are not amateurs, they do not have a professional career. Some of these people are neither interested nor probably aware that they make art, summarizes the director of MUSAC. But that makes them really powerful doses.

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Marginal art is placed at the center of great museums | Culture - Explica