Author: admin

Catalan Art Brut sculptor and writer, born in 1911 in Agullana (Catalonia), died in 1997 in Toulouse.

Life

From a family of cork makers, he learned the working of cork from his parents and practised it himself. He received only a basic education but was drawn to writing early on: as a teenager he published articles and poems devoted to the cork oak in the local press.

An anti-fascist, he joined the anti-fascist committee and the town council of his village, then enlisted in the Republican army in 1936, where he ran a front-line publication. In February 1939, after Franco’s victory, he crossed into France; arrested in Perpignan, he was interned for more than a year in the camp at Bram (Aude). Settled in Toulouse, he worked in a cork factory and started a family with Paz Santiago Ruiz, a refugee like himself, with whom he had three daughters. Under the Occupation he was sent to the Récébédou camp, then to Le Croisic, where he worked for the Todt Organisation on the Atlantic Wall.

Jean Dubuffet discovered his sculptures in Paris, in the office of René Lajus, the factory’s manager, and at the end of 1948 devoted an exhibition to him at the Foyer de l’art brut, with the participation of André Breton. Gironella wrote poems, plays and novels all his life, for a long time without a publisher, as well as an autobiographical account, L’exil, mon village et moi (1984).

The work

Around 1941 he tried clay, which did not suit him, then devoted himself to cork, which he carved from the block, in the round as well as in low relief. His figures, born of his imagination and nourished by memories of his native Catalonia, play on a whimsical perspective and disproportionate limbs that heighten their expressiveness. He later made wall panels inspired by Catalonia, Islamic art and medieval art. In 1990 he published Exaltació del suro, a collection of poems and images made entirely of cork.

Exhibitions

• 1948: solo exhibition at the Foyer de l’art brut, Paris, organised by Jean Dubuffet
• 1967: “L’art brut”, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris
• 2021: “Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty”, Barbican, London
• 2022-2023: monographic exhibition at the Museu de l’Exili, La Jonquera, then at the Cork Museum in Palafrugell
• 2023: exhibition at the Galerie christian berst, Paris

British mediumistic draughtswoman, born Maude Ethel Eades on 19 January 1882 in east London, died in 1961.

Life

Regarded as an illegitimate child, she was kept out of sight in her early years. At nine, although her mother was still alive, she was placed in one of Dr Barnardo’s homes at Barkingside. In 1896 she was among the children sent to Canada, where she was put to work as a domestic servant on farms in Ontario. Back in East Ham in 1900, she lived with an aunt who introduced her to spiritualism and astrology, and worked as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital.

At twenty-five she married her cousin Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. The couple had three sons. The second, Reginald, died of Spanish flu; the following year she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The illness that followed confined her to bed for several months and left her blind in her left eye. It was then, around 1920, at thirty-eight, that she suddenly began to draw. After the death of her eldest son in 1958 she sank into alcoholism and stopped drawing. Thousands of drawings were discovered in her home at her death.

The work

Madge Gill attributed her work to a spirit guide she called Myrninerest (“my inner rest”), the name with which she often signed her works. For fear of displeasing it, she never sold anything. She drew mainly in black ink, on supports ranging from postcards to long rolls of calico, some more than nine metres long; she also knitted, wove and wrote. Prolific, she could complete dozens of drawings in a single night.

Her compositions repeat oval female faces with large almond eyes, often staring, caught in chequerboards and labyrinthine architectures, the bodies almost absent or hidden beneath heavy clothing. The art historian Roger Cardinal speaks in her regard of “an art of concealment”.

Exhibitions and collections

• Whitechapel Gallery, London: exhibitions from 1932 to 1947, including that of 1939 in which she showed a work of some 40 metres covering a whole wall
• 2006: “Outsider Art”, Tate Britain; 2019: “Myrninerest”, William Morris Gallery, London; 2024: Venice Biennale
• Collections: London Borough of Newham (main holding); Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq (L’Aracine donation, 1999); Centre Pompidou (Bruno Decharme donation, 2021)
• At the gallery: Sans titre, 1953, 63 x 51 cm, shown in the exhibition “Art Brut” (June-July 2022)

Russian biologist and painter, a figure of Art Brut, born on 3 December 1893 in Moscow, died on 5 April 1979 in Haar, near Munich.

Life

The second of five children, he grew up in a well-to-do scientific milieu. His father, Georg Gabritschevsky (1860-1907), an internationally renowned bacteriologist, had worked with Louis Pasteur in Paris and Robert Koch in Germany, and founded the first institute of epidemiology and microbiology in Moscow. The children were taught by some twenty private tutors. According to his brother Georg, Eugen was already drawing when he could barely read and write.

In 1913 he entered Moscow University to study biology, heredity and entomology. He left the Soviet Union for good in 1924 and arrived in New York in January 1925 to work at Columbia University with Thomas Hunt Morgan, then at the Woods Hole laboratory in 1926. From 1927 to 1929 he pursued his research on insect mutations at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, under Professor Roux. Invited to the University of Edinburgh in 1931, he had to stop in October of that year: his mental health was deteriorating.

Committed in 1931 to the Eglfing-Haar psychiatric hospital, he spent the rest of his life there, apart from a few stays with relatives. Jean Dubuffet discovered his work in 1948 through his doctor. In 1960, at Dubuffet’s instigation, the Vence gallerist Alphonse Chave travelled to Germany and acquired more than 5,000 sheets. Much of this later passed to the Galerie Daniel Cordier.

The work

Over some thirty years he produced thousands of works on paper, mainly in gouache and watercolour, but also in pencil, charcoal and pastel. He used many techniques: frottage, dabbing, scraping, folding, sponge, rag, decalcomania. He painted on salvaged supports: tracing paper, X-ray films, magazine pages, calendars, the hospital’s administrative documents.

They include peopled or deserted landscapes, cities and crowds, night scenes (carnivals, festivities, concerts), mutating bodies, hybrid beings and bestiaries of fabulous creatures. Max Ernst bought five paintings from him in 1972.

Exhibitions and collections

• 2016: retrospective at La maison rouge, Paris (some 250 works), shown again at the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (2016-2017) and the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2017)
• Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (works acquired by Dubuffet for the Compagnie de l’art brut)
• Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Daniel Cordier donation, 1989), on deposit at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
• At the gallery: Sans titre, 1960, watercolour and gouache on paper, 20 x 28.5 cm, shown in the exhibition “Art Brut” (June-July 2022); works shown in “Favourites: Art Brut, Naive Art, Art Singulier” (March-April 2024)

Austrian Art Brut draughtsman, born on 5 October 1919 in Eggendorf am Wagram (Lower Austria), died on 23 September 2008. He belongs to the group of Gugging artists.

Life

The third of seven children, he grew up on a small farm and vineyard. After primary school he trained as a baker, up to master level. Conscripted into the German army in 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Americans. A year after the end of the war he took over the family farm as a winegrower.

He first saw a psychiatrist in 1957, then worked again as a baker. He later became a permanent patient of the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna (in 1961 according to the Museum Gugging, in 1967 according to the Collection de l’Art Brut). In 1982 he joined the group of residents of the centre for art and psychotherapy founded by the psychiatrist Leo Navratil, today’s House of Artists (Haus der Künstler).

The work

It was through contact with the artistic activity of the House of Artists that he began to draw, in pencil and graphite: animals, objects, people caught at their trades. From 1984 he introduced coloured pencils, mostly warm yellows and browns, and his compositions became dense and tightly packed.

At the end of the 1980s, writing invaded the sheet: a calligraphed text on lines he drew himself, divided into numbered sections to show the reading order. In the end the text dominated, with the image serving only as illustration. His comments, often political, social or religious, speak of family, illness, farming, machines, Catholicism and above all Austria, which he evokes as a patriot without refraining from denouncing its injustices.

Exhibitions and collections

• 1983: exhibition of the Gugging artists at the Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna
• Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne