Roger Ballen Exhibition in Austria at Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging - "roger ballen.! drawing meets photography" Exhibition

Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography

Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria

September 25, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Roger Ballen

Funeral rites, 2004

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Untitled, 2020

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Wall shadows, 2003

© Roger Ballen

The exhibition roger ballen.! drawing meets photography by South African-based photo artist ROGER BALLEN (*1950) transcends the boundaries between photography and other art forms, at museum gugging.

Nina Ansperger and Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

"With Roger Ballen, we are bringing one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century to museum gugging," explains Nina Ansperger, the exhibition's curator. Over the past decades, his artistic work has evolved from narrative photography to a work increasingly dominated by drawing. Drawing is therefore the focus of this exhibition. "Roger Ballen is closely connected to Jean Dubuffet's idea of ​​Art Brut and defines himself as an 'outsider.' Drawing, as a central element of his photographic art, is simultaneously the most important medium of the art from Gugging. Thus, not only the subject matter but also the location of the exhibition could not be more appropriate," Nina Ansperger asserts. 

Roger Ballen, who refers to himself as an “outsider,” said: “I have brought drawing and photography into painting to produce a mixed medium image. It has been my goal to break down the boundaries between photography and other arts, taking photography out of its self-isolation as a form.” 

Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

New York-born Roger Ballen has lived in South Africa for several decades. His photographic works, created over 40 years, possess incredible narrative power because they oscillate between painting, drawing, installation, and photography. His “Ballenesque” aesthetic is unsettling, vehemently demands self-reflection and leads to a journey into one’s own unconscious.

Curator: Nina Ansperger

MUSEUM GUGGING

Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging

www.museumgugging.at

Suresh Prandi @ Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan - "Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​" Exhibition

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan

Through September 26, 2025

Maroncelli 12 gallery presents the Suresh Prandi’s debut on the art scene and the power of his painting. “Spirito e spettri nel colore di Suresh / Spirit and Spectres in Suresh’s colour” is curated by art historian Bianca Tosatti. This is the first ever exhibition of this young artist. 

The exhibition will continue at the Gliacrobati gallery in Turin, in June-July 2026. 

Suresh Prandi’s works move emotions: the artist’s vision breaks the canonical scheme of perspective, in a dense carpet of pasty chromatic fields, supported by black strokes that allude to forms of human features. Suresh Prandi’s creative process is born from a meditative state during which the lines become tangled on a chromatic base stratified on many levels: in fact, as in the gymnastics that the artist systematically practices, spiritual understanding cannot be seen unless one learns the right techniques. And in this mass of matter, the eye emerges - more eyes - that attract the viewer and like magnets suck him into "lakes" of color. 

"And at once I find the eye that is looking back at me: extraordinarily large, fixed and enquiring - writes Bianca Tosatti in the critical text in the catalog -; a vortex sucking me inward, amplifying the tremors of my mental terrain; an outward explosion of my existence whose forms it shakes. And so the work becomes a subject-gaze situated in the field of the Other, because it is the image that looks at the subject".

Suresh Prandi was born on June 9, 1998 in Bangalore (India), where he spent his early years with his parents. At the age of eight he was adopted by the Prandi family and moved to Campogalliano, a small village in the province of Modena, where he still lives. He regularly attended elementary, middle and high school, graduating from the professional institute of Correggio (Reggio Emilia) in “Services for Agriculture and Rural Development”. Thanks to his idol, Cristiano Ronaldo, Suresh Prandi first became passionate about football and then about gymnastics, developing a true cult for the body, around which all his days now revolve. In 2018 Suresh Prandi began his placement at the day center of the Nazareno cooperative in Carpi, in the province of Modena (an association for the reception, care and rehabilitation of people with disabilities), where he began to express himself through drawing. Noticing his natural talent and the benefits he derives from it in terms of relationships and personal well-being, in 2024 it was decided to permanently include him in Manolibera painting atelier, where he works every day. 

The artist often uses oil pastels to create a chromatic mosaic that almost entirely covers the previously created drawing; he is a master in the combination of color that never fades into the next shade but it is placed next to it as if the hues and combinations were innate. And speaking of “Landscape with Angel”, Bianca Tosatti writes: “The colour is approached in a circumspect and yet ambitious way; weighed and divided like the cones of pigment on an Indian market stall, arranged by a wise seller so that the emotional value of each one can be perceived”. 

MARONCELLI 12 GALLERY

Via Maroncelli, 12 – Milan

maroncelli12.it

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan, May 28 – September 26, 2025

sexy... @ Galerie Gugging, Maria Gugging - Featured Artists: Basel Al-Bazzaz, Johann Garber, Helga Sophia Goetze, Julia Hanzl, Johann Korec, Hannes Lehner, Karl Vondal

sexy... Basel Al-Bazzaz, Johann Garber, Helga Sophia Goetze, Julia Hanzl, Johann Korec, Hannes Lehner, Karl Vondal

Galerie Gugging, Maria Gugging 

February 20 – May 11, 2025

JOHANN GARBER

A.LADY, 1988

Ink, 14,7 x 10,4 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, 2001

Pencil, embroidery, 76 x 77,8 cm

© Sammlung Pott

BASEL AL-BAZZAZ

Wicked beauty by night, 2021

Pencil, colored pencils, 42 x 56 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

In the exhibition “sexy…”, seven unique artists come together at the Galerie Gugging and whisk the visitors away into their erotic worlds. From the sexy works of the Gugging Artists Johann Garber, Johann Korec and Karl Vondal to the fascinating universe of Helga Sophia Goetze, the oriental women of Basel Al-Bazzaz, the naked men of Hannes Lehner and the ceramics of Julia Hanzl. 

The depiction of naked bodies has a long tradition, from the earliest cave paintings to the present day. Many Gugging Artists and their national and international colleagues have also taken up the theme from the very beginning.

BASEL AL-BAZZAZ

Moulin Rouge, 2020

Pencil, colored pencils, 42 x 56 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

Basel Al-Bazzaz presents his colourful oeuvre. The artist, who was originally born in Baghdad, has been working in a print workshop in Vienna since 2000, where he creates fine, detailed works on paper that have a special effect on the viewer. Using watercolours, pencils and coloured pencils to create works of art is Al-Bazzaz’s great passion. His playful, erotic depictions of women also reflect his longing for the Orient. While he often uses models for his depictions of plants and animals, the inspiration for his depictions of naked women comes from his own imagination.

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, n.d.

Pencil, 21 x 29,6 cm

© Sammlung Pott

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, n. d.

Pencil, gouache,  colored pencils, 29,7 x 21 cm

© Sammlung Pott

The German artist Helga Sophia Goetze (1922 - 2008) was born in Magdeburg. She was a feminist icon, who loved to break boundaries and boldly share her views out into the world. Goetze left behind a fascinating universe of painted pictures, embroidered carpets, sketches, collages and an extensive written legacy, including numerous poems. She was known and infamous for her “vigil” at the Berlin Memorial Church, where she held out for an hour every day for over 20 years from 1983 to proclaim her message: “Fucking is peace!” The Galerie Gugging shows a tapestry and sketches by the artist and poet, who was an investigative, sharp observer and chronicler of her time, as part of the sexy… exhibition.

JOHANN GARBER

A-JUNGLE, 2010

Indian Ink, 29,7 x 42 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

The Gugging Artist Johann Garber is best known for his dense Indian ink drawings. A recurring theme in his work are his so-called “Sexi papers”. These have even adorned the renowned Museum of Sex on 5th Avenue in New York. “If you ask Johann Garber why he keeps drawing naked people, his answer is: because that is how we are born! – We come like this … and we leave like this”, says galerie gugging director Nina Katschnig with a smile. Johann Garber was born in Wiener Neustadt and has lived in the House of Artists in Gugging since 1981.

Julia Hanzl is an innovative ceramic artist from Vienna, who has already made a name for herself across borders, especially in the United States, and grew up in a family of artists. The self-taught artist, whose works usually have a provocative sexy-erotic touch, is appreciated for her unmistakable ceramics, mixed media sculptures, porcelain & bronze editions and ceramic sculptures in combination with taxidermy. Julia Hanzl lives and works in Mödling.

JOHANN KOREC

Lovers in winter, 1998

Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

© Art Brut KG

JOHANN KOREC

Alexandera Korbus:, 2003

Indian Ink, Watercolours, 18,9 x 13,9 cm

© Art Brut KG

For the Gugging Artist Johann Korec, the nude depiction of couples was the predominant favourite theme in his works, which he celebrated extensively. Korec lived in the House of Artists in Gugging from 1981 until his death in 2008. While he began his artistic career by tracing figures, drawing and painting lovers later became his preferred motif. The protagonist was almost always the artist himself. He usually added a description of the subjects at the bottom of the picture, making the works appear like a diary. His depicted partners did not come from his imagination, but were often actual girlfriends from the time. In 1990, he was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, as was Johann Garber with the group of the Gugging Artists.

HANNES LEHNER

Naked Man with column, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils

42 x 29,7 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

HANNES LEHNER

Sensual naked man, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils

42 x 29,7 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

Born in Vienna in 1986, Hannes Lehner loves muscular bodies, enjoys going to the gym and wanted to become an underwear model himself. The artist’s creative career includes central themes such as landscapes, architecture, automobiles, outer space, fantastic animal figures and now also male nudes. Over the years, he has created an extensive oeuvre that includes drawings, paintings and three-dimensional objects. The lively artist, who is always up for a joke, uses acrylic, coloured pencil, gouache or paperboard for his works. Hannes Lehner’s sexy, well-trained men, usually staged in bright colours, are the logical continuation of his popular houses and cars.

KARL VONDAL

She loves music, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils, Indian Ink

29,8 x 70 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

KARL VONDAL

With kisses both, 2022

Mixed media, 59,4 x 42 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

The Gugging Artist Karl Vondal is describes by the Galerie Gugging director Nina Katschnig as the “master of eroticism from Gugging”. Vondal lived in the House of Artists in Gugging from 2002 to 2024 and had a particular fondness for erotic depictions, which he worked on tirelessly day and night. His nude women and loving couples usually appear with him in the role of the prince – in delicate pastel tones, which became more vibrant towards the end of his career. The protagonists of his works are often found on islands under palm trees or above the roofs of towns and villages. Similar to Johann Korec, his works are usually accompanied by illustrious stories. In sexy… the Galerie Gugging exhibits small and large works, some of which have been elaborately and very vividly staged with matchsticks.

GALERIE GUGGING

At Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging, Austria

galeriegugging.com

Outsider Art Fair 2005 - Artists, Exhibitors...

Outsider Art Fair 2005

Metropolitan Pavilion, New York

February 27 - March 2, 2025

Aloïse Corbaz (1886 - 1964)

Untitled (Figures with Blue Eyes) - Double Sided, ca. 1950s

Colored pencil on paper 

Courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery 

Bill Traylor (1854 - 1949) 

Figures, Construction, Black, Brown and Red, 1939/42

Pencil, poster paint on cardboard 

Courtesy of Fleisher Ollman Gallery 

Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930) 

New Yorker Haven, 1925

Colored pencil and graphite on paper 

Courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

The 33rd edition of Outsider Art Fair (OAF), the premier fair dedicated to Self-Taught Art, art brut, and Outsider Art, features 66 exhibitors from 40 cities in 9 countries at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

Visitors to the fair can expect to see art by acknowledged masters such as Henry Darger (1892–1973), William Edmondson (1874–1951), Augustin Lesage (1876–1954), Judith Scott (1943-2005), and Bill Traylor (1854-1949), as well as works by living artists such as Noviadi Angkasapura, JJ Cromer, Shuvinai Ashoona, M’onma, Julian Martin, Margot, Dan Miller and Leopold Strobl.

OAF 2025 welcomes back renowned dealers like Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), which will be devoting its entire presentation to works from the estate of long-time American Folk Art Museum board member Audrey B. Heckler. It will include examples by James Castle (1899-1977), Sam Doyle (1906-1985), Howard Finster (1916-2001), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), and Bill Traylor. Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York) will present works from the collection of advertising pioneer Robert M. Greenberg. Built over more than 40 years, this collection holds superb works by Darger, Traylor, and Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), among others. Aarne Anton/Nexus Singularity (New York), Cavin-Morris Gallery (New York), Marion Harris (Connecticut and New York), all of whom have exhibited with OAF since its founding, make their returns, and after a five-year hiatus, original exhibitor Henry Boxer (London) will also be on hand.

Chico da Silva (1910 - 1985) 

Bichos 

Courtesy Simões de Assis and Estudio em Obra.

Conceição dos Bugres (1914 - 1984)

Untitled 

Courtesy Galerie Estação and João Libertato

Outsider Art Fair 2005's Curated Space, Follow My Moves, will be an exhibit of Self-Taught art from Brazil, curated by São Paulo-based Mateus Nunes, and will feature works by renowned artists such as Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995), Chico da Silva (1910–1985), Conceição dos Bugres (1914-1984), and Maria Lira Marques (b. 1945).

Other booth highlights include paintings by Maurice Sullins (1910–1995) at Hana Pietri (Chicago), paintings by manga artist Takashi Nemoto at Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo), and works from Canadian Arctic and by other contemporary Inuit artists at Feheley Fine Arts (Toronto). Zürcher Gallery will feature a solo show of drawings by American poet Ted Joans (1928-2003) and James Barron will exhibit the work of Janet Sobel (1893–1968), whose abstract paintings were championed by Peggy Guggenheim in the 1940s and were recently featured in a solo exhibition at Houston’s Menil Collection.

OAF 2025 will welcome eighteen first-time exhibitors, including Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo), BravinLee Programs (New York), Court Tree Collective (Brooklyn), Diamond (New York), Espacio KB (Bogota), Elza Kayal Gallery (New York), The FolkArtwork Collective (Des Moines, Iowa), Hughes at Olsen (Sydney, Australia), Interact Center for Visual & Performing Arts (St. Paul, MN), Gallery jones (Vancouver), Galerie Kahn (Ars-en-Ré, France), Keith De Lellis Gallery (New York), Modesti Perdriolle Gallery (Brussels), Claire Oliver Gallery (New York), Pan American Art Projects (Miami), Peninsula Art Space (New York), Plataforma ArtBase (Mexico City), and Van Der Plaas (New York).

“The 2025 Outsider Art Fair is a testament to the rich diversity of our field, and as always, embraces art from the fringes,” said Andrew Edlin, the fair’s owner. “As the art world continues to catch on to the power of the work our exhibitors have been championing for decades, a new generation of OAF dealers is discovering artists who will become part of the canon in years to come.”

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2025 EXHIBITORS

Aarne Anton/Nexus Singularity (Pomona, NY)

Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo)

Bill Arning Exhibitions (Kinderhook, NY)

Arts of Life/Circle Contemporary (Chicago)

bg Gallery (Los Angeles)

James Barron Art (Kent, CT)

Margaret Bodell/ Revival Arts (Milford, CT)

Henry Boxer Gallery (London)

BravinLee Programs (New York)

Norman Brosterman (New York)

Cavin-Morris Gallery (New York)

Center for Creative Works (Wynnewood, PA)

Court Tree Collective (Brooklyn)

Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA)

Creativity Explored (San Francisco)

M. David & Co. (Brooklyn)

Diamond (New York)

dieFirma (New York)

Dutton (New York)

Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York)

Elza Kayal Gallery (New York)

Espacio KB (Bogotá)

Feheley Fine Arts (Toronto)

Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia)

The FolkArtwork Collective (Des Moines, IA)

Fountain House (New York)

Hana Pietri Presents (Chicago)

Harman Projects (New York)

Marion Harris (New York and CT)

Hughes at Olsen (Sydney, Australia)

Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (St. Paul, MN)

Gallery Jones (Vancouver)

Galerie Kahn (Ars-en-Ré, France)

Kishka Gallery & Library (White River Junction, VT)

koelsch gallery (Houston)

Yukiko Koide Presents (Kyoto, Japan)

LAND Gallery (Brooklyn)

Jennifer Lauren Gallery (Manchester, UK)

Keith De Lellis Gallery (New York)

Galerie Pol Lemétais (Toulouse, France)

Lindsay Gallery (Columbus, OH)

Joshua Lowenfels Works of Art (New York)

Magic Markings (New York)

Modesti Perdriolle Gallery (Brussels)

North Pole Studio (Portland, OR)

Northern Daughters (Vergennes, VT)

Claire Oliver Gallery (New York)

Pan American Art Projects (Miami)

Peninsula Art Space (New York)

Plataforma ArtBase (Montreal / Mexico City)

Portrait Society Gallery (Milwaukee)

Steven S. Powers (New York

PULP (Holyoke, MA)

Pure Vision Arts (New York)

Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York)

Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg, France)

The Ruffed Grouse Gallery (Narrowsburg, NY)

SAGE Studio (Austin, TX)

SARAHCROWN (New York)

Shelter Gallery (New York)

SHRINE (Los Angeles /New York)

Stellarhighway (Brooklyn)

Stewart Gallery (Boise, ID)

Van Der Plas Gallery (New York)

Wilsonville (East Hampton, NY)

Zürcher Gallery (New York)

NOT IN NEW YORK?

The Online Viewing Room of the OAF 2025 

will be live on February 27th

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2025

Metropolitan Pavilion

125 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011

outsiderartfair.com

Artist Dan Miller @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - "Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan" Exhibition

Dan Miller 

Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

September 6 - October 19, 2024

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan, its third solo exhibition of works by California-based artist DAN MILLER (b. 1961). A thirty-two-year veteran of Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, the pioneering non-profit serving artists with disabilities, Dan Miller has exhibited his work widely, initially within the Outsider Art community and subsequently at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Glossolalia, 2008), the Venice Biennale (Viva Arte Viva, 2017), and currently SFMOMA (Creative Growth: The House that Art Built, 2024).

Diagnosed with autism, Dan Miller is mostly nonverbal. He works ambidextrously with intense, frenetic concentration, obsessively layering words or phrases until their legibility is obliterated. In the period leading up to Venice (2017), Dan Miller began to create on a larger, and in some cases, monumental scale. This exhibition features a slew of recent large-scale acrylic and ink works on paper, highlighted by an imposing horizontal piece from 2022 measuring over thirteen feet in length. A painted navy blue and black background is punctuated by slashing yellow lines and scrawled, readable words like “fan” and “socket.” As is overwhelmingly the case with Dan Miller’s work, most of his imagery is indecipherable, however, in several mid-sized compositions, he repeatedly renders the identifiable outline of a light bulb.

In addition to the artist’s heavily painted works, the exhibition includes a select group of delicate ballpoint pen drawings. Where lone words appear to float to the surface in the painted pieces, these smaller monochromatic compositions achieve total abstraction. Symbols are totally obscured within shifting fields of color that emit an almost electromagnetic quality.

Dan Miller’s art is included in the permanent collections of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, CA, the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., among others. In 2018, the artist was featured in the documentary series, Art in the Twenty-first Century, produced by Art 21.

The gallery will also feature Dan Miller’s art at Art Basel Paris, from October 16-20, in a three-artist presentation with works by Forrest Bess (1911-1977) and Melvin Way (1954-1974).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 

www.edlingallery.com

Anthony Dominguez Exhibition @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - "Kindness Cruelty Continuum"

Anthony Dominguez 

Kindness Cruelty Continuum 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

February 24 – April 6, 2024 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by ANTHONY DOMINGUEZ (1960-2014), an artist who chose to live unhoused in New York City for more than twenty years. It is the late artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Anthony Dominguez was the son of a successful commercial artist in Fort Worth, Texas. He immersed himself in art from an early age and later took university art courses, but  never earned a degree. While in his twenties he moved to New York, where he found work at a commercial printing company.

At the end of the 1980s, Anthony Dominguez abandoned his East Village apartment, tossed his possessions and art materials into a dumpster, and spent the rest of his life as a homeless wanderer. Spending most of his time in New York, he forsook any semblance of security, sheltering in tunnels, cardboard boxes, and other hideaways. To his way of thinking, he had set himself free.

Anthony Dominguez never stopped making art and left a substantial body of distinctive work, all made from scavenged materials. Early pieces include small, black-fabric discs whose uniquely stylized imagery is imprinted with custom-made stencils and bleach applied with hypodermic syringes. Dominguez intended these round patches to be sewn onto clothing, and covered his own jacket with them.

This jacket caught the attention of Aarne and Tina Anton, who became the first to exhibit Anthony Dominguez’s work—at Art on the Edge, Tina’s nonprofit studio for homeless artists, and later at Aarne’s gallery, American Primitive, both in Lower Manhattan. Anthony Dominguez was represented by Art on the Edge until it closed in 1996, after which American Primitive showed his work until the gallery closed in 2020.

Exposure to a receptive audience propelled Anthony Dominguez into a more ambitious mode. He started creating larger, rectangular-format paintings that didn’t rely on stenciled imagery, although they retained the stark, white-on-black palette. He also began to expand his thematic focus, centered on his philosophy of radical freedom.

Anthony Dominguez’s early paintings portray the actions of stylized humanoid figures and skeletons in abstracted, stage-like settings. Often appearing in these compact narratives are butterflies, traditional emblems of metamorphosis. The overarching theme is the cyclical interplay of life and death. The artist typically worked on loose canvas or other fabrics scavenged from the Garment District. He stacked and rolled the paintings for easy storage.

The exhibition title references one of his most elaborate works, an untitled painting on a five-by-nine-foot sheet of black fabric. Kindness Cruelty Continuum was painted in a tunnel where it functioned as a mural. Anthony Dominguez removed it from the premises shortly before the building directly overhead burned down. Reminiscent of a game board, it features an intricate structure of stripped-down, stylized imagery including stairways, skulls, butterflies, a world globe, and a dozen tiny, anonymous stick figures, some bearing celebratory goblets. An arrow in the upper right, marked ‘EXIT,’ indicates the game’s apparent endpoint, where a skull adjoins a butterfly wing and a figure carrying a knapsack on a stick—sign of the archetypal homeless wanderer—ascends into the unknown beyond.

For years Anthony Dominguez relied exclusively on the white/black formula—metaphorically resonant as well as convenient, since it only required one color. He used paint he found in trash bins and scoured the streets for his implements—plastic condiment dispensers, drafting tools, and pens or brushes he made from found materials. Continually refining his style and technique, Dominguez expanded the range of his imagery and treated his themes with increasing nuance and narrative invention.

Around 2006, Anthony Dominguez made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to painting in black on white canvas—a change that highlighted his work’s graphic punch. He subsequently switched the combination back and forth—white-on-black, black-on-white—depending on the materials at hand.

In 2011 Anthony Dominguez taught himself to read and write music and learned to make pennywhistle flutes by boring holes in pieces of plastic plumbing pipe. In an open-ended series he called Picture Songs, he began adding music and lyrics to his paintings. It was the first of three significant developments in his art as he passed his fiftieth birthday.

Second was a new addition to his palette—red, the color of blood and, by association, the heart.

Third was the emergence of overtly Christian iconography, imagery, and song lyrics. Crosses and stylized portraits of Jesus repeatedly appear in his late paintings—a development perhaps rooted in his Roman Catholic upbringing, but also reflecting his interest in early Christian mysticism.

In 2013 he returned to Fort Worth to see his beloved Aunt Celia, who was very ill and died before the year was out. He stayed into 2014 to take care of family business, then headed back to New York, stopping about twenty-five miles short of the city. In a thinly populated part of New Jersey, his body was found in a wooded area, where he’d evidently hanged himself from a railroad trestle.  Significantly, it was Holy Saturday, commemorating the interval between Jesus’s Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

During his lifetime Anthony Dominguez’s work was shown in New York at American Primitive Gallery, Cavin-Morris, Clayton Gallery, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning; in Philadelphia at Janet Fleisher Gallery; in Baltimore at the American Visionary Art Museum; in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston; and in the Czech Republic at the Galerie U Recickych, Prague. His work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition: 

Frances Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut opening in April, 2024 at the American Folk Art Museum, New York  (April 12 – August 18, 2024).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 

www.edlingallery.com

Art Brut in Poland @ Olomouc Museum of Art - Harbours of Unease - Exhibition + Catalogue

Harbours of Unease. Art Brut in Poland

Olomouc Museum of Art

19 October 2023 - 25 February 2024

Ryszard Kosek

Woman, 1980s–1990s

Toothpaste, hardboard, 56 x 32 cm

Andrzej Kwasiborski’s collection, Płock

Dionizy Purta 

Dog, 1993

Wood, polychromy, 27 x 25 x 13 cm

Leszek Macak’s collection, Kraków

Maria Wnęk 

St. Veronica Wiping The Lord’s Face, N/A,

Oil, paper, 60 x 43 cm 

Silesian Museum, Katowice 

Edmund Monsiel 

For the Worshipping of the Madonna of Częstochowa by Believers,1960 

Pencil, paper, 42.7 x 51 cm, 

Leszek Macak’s collection, Kraków

A motionless human face with a moustache and hundreds of watching eyes filling every millimetre of the paper. You can feel the tension, the fear, the anxiety, the eyes are everywhere, watching you until it gives you chills. The pencil drawings of Edmund Monsiel (1897-1962), who hid from the Nazis in the attic of his brother's house in Poland during World War II, depict one theme almost obsessively endlessly. The author eventually became completely isolated, suffering from autism and hallucinations.

This story also illustrates what art brut is - the art of untrained artists growing out of their inner tension, the urge to express themselves. Often these are people with mental issues or living marginalized. Olomouc Museum of Art will present their art at the exhibition Harbours of Unease. Art Brut in Poland. "Raw or crude art - art brut - differs from folk art, which is often linked to craftsmanship, or naive art that captures and often or idealises the surrounding world. Art brut artists draw from their inner self, they have their own inner universe whose vision they transfer into sculptures and paintings," explains the curator Šárka Belšíková. "They don't create for presentation, but out of an inner pressure for their own sake."

Julian Stręk 

Polish Kings’ Gallery, 1990s 

Wood, polychromy, 115 x 98 x 39 cm 

Leszek Macak’s collection, Kraków

Krzysztof Grodzicki 

Adam’s Creation, 2015

Wood, polychrome, 78 x 60 x 15 cm 

Leszek Macak’s collection, Kraków

Stanisław Zagajewski 

An Animal, 1989

Fired clay, 29.5 x 43 x 27 cm 

Andrzej Kwasiborski’s collection, Płock

For the first time ever in the Czech Republic, the Olomouc Museum of Art presents a comprehensive exhibition of Polish art brut. On view are around 200 paintings, drawings and three-dimensional objects by thirty artists from the first half of the 20th century to the present day.

In Poland, as in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, interest in art brut was triggered by a wave of private collecting and survey. "Of particular note is the collection of the Krakow lawyer Lezsek Macak, from which a large part of our exhibition comes. Leszek Macak not only collected the works, but also took care of them and materially helped the creators of art brut, people on the margins, socially disqualified, yet with great creative potential," says Anežka Šimková, co-author of the exhibition. A new generation of collectors and theoreticians has emerged in 1990s who are striving to bring art brut closer to a wider audience and present this phenomenon abroad.

Thanks to these collectors, art brut is gradually becoming part of the world's leading collections and exhibitions. "A groundbreaking event was the inclusion of a selection of works by representatives of art brut and imaginative art from around the world in the main exhibition 55. Venice Biennale in 2013, where the work of the Czech artist Anna Zemánková shone. Another important world event was the inclusion of the gift of the collection of art brut collector Bruno Dechamp in the Centre Georges Pompidou's collection in 2021. The Paris museum has set a separate space for it in the permanent exhibition of modern and contemporary art, where Czech artists Adéla Ducháčová, Vlasta Kodríková, Slávka Lelková and others are also represented," Šimková lists. "Centre Pompidou has set out to make professional research on art brut one of its special long-term projects."

Adam Dembiński

Two Women and a Man, 1980s 

Markers, paper, 29.5 x 41.8 cm

Leszek Macak’s collection, Kraków

Roman Rutkowski 

no title, 2006

Crayon, paper, 100 x 70 cm 

Andrzej Kwasiborski’s collection, Płock

Genowefa Magiera

no title, 2013 

Ferment, cardboard, 79 x 108 cm 

Andrzej Kwasiborski’s collection, Płock

Justyna Matysiak 

Pilgrimage, 2006 

Markers, paper, 23.8 x 30 cm 

Lue Lu / Brut Now Foundation, Poznań

HARBOURS OF UNEASE. ART BRUT IN POLAND - PUBLICATION

The exhibition is also accompanied by the first ever major entry of the topic in the Czech Republic, the Czech-English publication Harbours of Unease. Art Brut in Poland including rich pictorial accompaniment and expert studies. The curators of the exhibition - Šárka Belšíková and Anežka Šimková - map the history of art brut in the Polish environment. Polish theoretician Grażyna Borowik contributes to the understanding of the activities of the centres associated with psychiatric care, Małgorzata Szaefer opens up the issue of the current status of art brut in Poland. Barbora Kundračíková writes about the authenticity of art in relation to art brut. The book designed by Petr Šmalec, with two hundred pictures in it, includes a comprehensive catalogue of medallions of the artists accompanied by examples of their works. As a bonus, there is a chronology highlighting important art brut events in Poland and around the world.

CURATORS: Šárka Belšíková, Anežka Šimková

OLOMOUC MUSEUM OF ART

MUZEUM UMĚNÍ OLOMOUC

státní příspěvková organizace

Denisova 47, 771 11, Olomouc

www.muo.cz

George Widener @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NTC – Tip of the Iceberg

George Widener: Tip of the Iceberg 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

May 20 – June 30, 2023 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Tip of the Iceberg, its first solo exhibition for George Widener since announcing its representation of the artist earlier this year. The show offers a twenty-two-year overview of George Widener’s oeuvre, which made a remarkable entry into the art world around the turn of the millennium, seemingly from out of nowhere.

An awkward social outsider during his troubled youth, GEORGE WIDENER (b. 1962) demonstrated exceptional memory skills and prodigious abilities in the fields of mathematics and temporal calculation. After graduating from high school with honors, he spent four years as an Air Force intelligence technician, specializing in aerial surveillance. An unhoused nomad for most of his twenties, he worked sporadically as a day-laborer before going to Europe without a plan, traveling from one city to another. During these seemingly aimless years he filled countless notebooks with numbers, calendrical sequences, architectural drawings, and statistics. After he suffered an extended spell of withdrawal and anxiety in the early 1990s, he was diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome, which removed the stigma of mental illness that he carried from previous misdiagnoses.

Buoyed by a newfound self-confidence, George Widener started making larger, more ambitious drawings, in which he combined his architecturally related images with his obsessive lists of dates, numbers, and statistical information—material previously confined to his notebooks. These were his first works to attract the attention of the art world. George Widener’s compositions are often executed on patched-together napkins and scrolls stained with tea to affect the look of parchment. Seemingly torn from ancient manuscripts, his works are layered with accident, palimpsests, and esoteric knowledge, incorporating elaborate numerical puzzles and games, complex puns, palindromes, and prophecies informed by historical events. Visually arresting and mysteriously compelling, the work is numerically dense and can be difficult to decode. George Widener explains that complex pattern relationships among some of the numerically rendered dates can only be appreciated by super-computers that haven’t yet been built. For him the processes of calculating and rendering the numbers constitute “an effort akin to meditation,” and mathematical analysis is not required to appreciate the work.

George Widener has long been intrigued by historical catastrophes and traumas—their circumstances, the dates on which they occurred, and all the related details. He has made many drawings about such events, especially on the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic on April 15, 1912. The disaster, along with and cross-sectional views of the ship, figures in several drawings here, and the exhibition’s title alludes to it.

George Widener’s “Megalopolis” series represents his vision of a humane approach to urban design. His ideas about sociological balance are visually expressed in the bilateral symmetry of these urban plans and their street systems.

Other drawings incorporate his renditions of magic squares (or magic circles)—a numerical grid in which the rows, columns, and diagonals add up to identical sums. Appropriating the form for his own purposes, he assigns calendar dates to each section.

A more recent category of George Widener’s art is represented by a large-scale self-portrait from 2020, a selective autobiographical overview consisting of block-lettered texts and miniature-scale imagery in a narrative format. In the concluding passage he obliquely references the COVID-19 pandemic through a depiction of beak-masked plague doctors from the fourteenth century—the era of the Black Death.

George Widener’s engagement with current events is reflected in a relatively new series, “Krakow to Ukraine,” and specifically with his direct, on-the-ground involvement in the war as a volunteer with a Polish group transporting non-military supplies into Ukraine. Some of his experiences in that endeavor are mapped in these drawings.

The thread that links all of these personal, social, and historical themes is numerical—lines, columns, and blocks of meditatively rendered, calendar-referenced numbers. With rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and the continued articulation of his individual experiences and thought processes, George Widener holds out hope that his work might one day yield a new understanding of time and the unfolding of human events.

George Widener’s art has appeared in numerous exhibitions at museums in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to a solo exhibition, Secret Universe, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2013), group exhibitions have included World Transformers: The Art of the Outsiders, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011); The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London (2013); Great and Might Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, (2013); Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler, the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2019); and Outsider Art: The Collection of Victor F. Keen, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago (2019). His work has been presented at numerous galleries including Henry Boxer (London), Carl Hammer (Chicago), Ricco Maresca (New York), Susanne Zander (Cologne) and was featured in the group exhibition System and Vision at David Zwirner Gallery (New York) in 2015.

The artist’s work can be found in many notable public and private collections, including, among others, the American Folk Art Museum (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the abcd/art brut Collection Bruno Decharme (Paris), the Museum of Everything (London), museum gugging (Klosterneuburg, Austria), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

_____________

American Outsider Art @ Philadelphia Museum of Art - Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection

Of God and Country: 

American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz  Collection 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

May 19, 2023 – January 1, 2024 

Josephus Farmer

Cotton Kingdom,1987

Paint and enamel on carved wood

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Jon Serl

Between Two Worlds, 20th century

Oil on board, artist-made frame 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Elijah Pierce

Untitled, 20th century

Paint, glitter, and varnish on carved wood 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition devoted to an important group of works by artists historically marginalized or excluded from traditional narratives of art history and typically described as “Outsider artists.” Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection explores their work through themes ranging from history to daily life, including the nation’s legacy of enslavement and racism, the landscape, and meditations on death and mortality. The exhibition features voices that variously critique and celebrate American life, often expressing ambivalence toward both the past and present while strong faith in the future, whether in this life or the next. Each work is drawn from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, including gifts, promised gifts, and loans to the museum. 

Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, said: “Surrender your ideas of genre as you enter Of God and Country and allow yourself to let codified art hierarchies and categories melt away. That is the special pleasure of this collection of work often called Outsider Art.  We are immensely grateful to Jill Bonovitz, and to our longstanding museum Trustee Sheldon Bonovitz, for this remarkable array of works. Not only did they generously present the museum with a major promised gift of their collection in 2011, but the Bonovitzes have continued to collect with insight and passion and have generously contributed additional gifts during their shared adventure.”

Many of the artists represented in the exhibition ultimately achieved considerable reputations. Martín Ramírez and Bill Traylor are considered iconic figures. Sister Gertrude Morgan, Rev. Howard Finster, Joseph Yoakum, and Purvis Young are also widely known, while others remain less well recognized practitioners in the field of 20th century American art, including Jon Serl, Bruno del Favero, and S.L. Jones.

Purvis Young

Untitled (Truck & Protesters), Late 20th century 

Mixed media, paint on wood construction 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Herbert Singleton

The Enemies Within, Late 20th century

Enamel on carved found wood

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

The exhibition includes a broad range of media, sizes, and styles, and is organized in four sections, beginning with U.S. History & Life in America, which contains potent symbols of the US, including the flag, Uncle Sam, and portraits of figures ranging from Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some works highlight positive aspects of American life while others, such as Jail was Heat, by Purvis Young (1943-2010) and The Enemies Within, by Herbert Singleton (1945-2007), contain themes of discriminatory policing and incarceration policies that target Black communities.

Joseph Yoakum

Mt Willow in Ozark Range, Jefferson City Missouri, 

Early to mid-20th century

Watercolor, pen, and ink on paper 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

A section called The American Landscape contains lively images of people and animals, agrarian life, and mountain ranges. Many of the artists represented here grew up in rural communities, often working on farms, while others traveled widely. Works by Martin Ramirez (1895-1963) include Horse and Rider, which evokes mineshafts and tunnels that the artist would have known working as a miner and railroad worker in California. Another drawing, by Joseph Yoakum (1891-1972), evokes dreamy mountains, rivers, gorges, and rocky outcroppings, suggesting an anthropomorphic vision infused by memory and imagination.

Sister Gertrude Morgan

The Lamb and his Bride, 20th century

Ink, acrylic, and crayon on repurposed Tide laundry detergent box 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Christianity and Spirituality reflects a history of American evangelicalism, as these artists often felt divinely inspired to make art and used their work to teach religious devotion. The section contains a focused grouping of works by street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), who established a gospel mission in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. She represented herself as the bride of Christ there in New Jerusalem Highway, a painting also populated with images of angels.

Howard Finster

People and Time Come Together . . ., #16,977, 1990 

Paint on wood cutout

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Death and Mortality, the final section, reflects upon life’s fragility and Christian afterlife. In People and Time Come Together, Rev. Howard Finster (1916-2001) offers us a scaly dinosaur, painted on wood, surrounded by warnings of apocalypse; he dedicated himself to art at age 60, following a vision, and produced thousands of works, often evoking the urgency of end times. Another highlight is St. Helena First Black Embalmer John, painted on a corrugated iron sheet by Sam Doyle (1906-1985). He often rendered Black celebrities, such as Ray Charles or Joe Louis, but here focuses on a man practicing his craft as an embalmer, readying the deceased for the next journey.

The exhibition is organized by Louis Marchesano, Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; Jessica Smith, Director of Curatorial Initiatives and Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art; Jun P. Nakamura, former Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow; with contributions from Monique D'Almeida, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow and Kendra Grimmett, former Carl Zigrosser Fellow.

“This exhibition is devoted to works created by people who operated far from the world of galleries, museums, and art schools, and yet they created astonishing works of art," said Louis Marchesano. “Of God and Country argues for a much wider, open-ended and more inclusive consideration of artistic vision in the United States of the 20th century and today.”

This exhibition is made possible by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

About the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection

It is considered one of the finest private collections of works by American self-taught artists, and Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz assembled it over the course of several decades before making part of it a promised gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2011. Including 177 works of art, it contributed significantly to establishing the Museum as one of the primary centers for the study of artists who once rarely found a place in American museums, many having operated without academic training and outside traditional artistic discourse. The works in the Bonovitz collection were often produced in remote places using unconventional methods and materials such as reclaimed wood, sheet metal, house paint, and stove soot. These works draw upon the artists’ own experiences, immediate surroundings, and popular culture. In 2013, in association with Yale University Press, the Philadelphia Museum of Art published Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, on the occasion of a major exhibition of the same title.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

philamuseum.org