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Eight from Europe

Press release:
Eight from Europe on display at Intuit
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art will present the exhibition, Eight from Europe: A Study Collection, from April 19, 2002 through April 2003, at Intuit, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday; admission is free. The exhibition opens with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, April 19.

Curated by Eugenie Johnson, Eight from Europe: A Study Collection introduces Chicago audiences to works by Adolf Wolfli (Switzerland), Carlo Zinelli (Italy), Augustin Lesage (France), Pascal Verbena (France), Anna Zemankova (Czechoslovakia), Scottie Wilson (Scotland), Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern (Germany), and Madge Gill (England).

The recognition and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art can be traced to Europe in the early 20th century. Psychiatrists such as Dr. Walter Morgenthaler and Dr. Hans Prinzhorn and later artists, in particular Jean Dubuffet, began to champion the previously neglected art of self-taught visionaries. Dubuffet coined the term art brut (“raw art”) to refer to works “produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activity of intellectuals). These artists derive everything – subjects, choices of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, styles of writing, etc. – from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to a completely pure artistic operation, raw, brut, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses. It is thus an art which manifests an unparalleled inventiveness, unlike cultural art, with its chameleon- and monkey-like aspects.” Dubuffet gave the name art brut to art which “did not know its name,” an art so pure that its creators were not even aware that it was art at all.

On display concurrently with Eight from Europe: A Study Collection, is the exhibit Soulful Pieces: Memory Jars and Quilts by Unknown Makers, which runs through August 2002, in Intuit’s front gallery.