Jaime Fernandes
Portugal, 1900-1969
Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1938, he was hospitalized for more than three decades at the psychiatric hospital Miguel Bombarda in Lisbon, where he would die in 1969. Jaime Fernandes unexpectedly started drawing at the age of 66, four years before his death, according to testimonies and references made to the drawings in the hospital’s medical records and in the letters he wrote to his wife. The whole set of his known work is composed of undated drawings, mainly made with colored ballpoint pens on different types of paper, where a reduced form of figures, especially imaginary animals, human or anthropomorphic figures, appears and reappears in countless variations, always drawn in a dense web of lines.
Anna Zemánková
Czech Republic, 1908 – 1986
From an early age, Anne showed a special appreciation for drawing. However, forced by her family, she pursued a career as a dental technician. In 1933, she married a high official and began dedicating herself exclusively to the household and her three children. The family moved to Prague at the end of the Second World War, and in 1950 Anne suffered a major depression aggravated by the subsequent amputation of both legs. She began drawing as a daily practice when she was over fifty: spontaneous manifestations of vegetal inspiration that, according to her, are inspired by magnetic forces that she senses between 4 and 7 am, with a totally unpredictable final result. These creations, with surprising details, possessing a characteristic rhythm between spirals, arabesques and geometric shapes, make Zemánková a prominent figure in the art brut scene.
Aloïse Corbaz
Switzerland, 1886 – 1964
Aloïse Corbaz’s artistic technique is closely linked to her illness – schizophrenia – and her hospitalization in a psychiatric ward for forty-six years. She used materials she found in garbage cans. These materials were flattened, smoothed and patched together, using white cotton and red thread. The sheets of paper sewn together allowed her to create very large drawings, which Corbaz kept in rolls. The world she created is populated with human figures, animals, flowers and fruits in theatrical performances: some of her themes mimic gestures and poses inspired by illustrated magazines or adopt the attributes and postures of actors in ritual theater or opera. Theater, opera and amorous couples adorn this cosmogony, in which powerful erotic forms are developed.
Biography adapted from “AWARE: Archives of Women Artists” by Catherine Gonnard
Henry Darger
USA, 1892-1973
Henry Darger lived in an orphanage and was later admitted to an asylum for mentally impaired children. He worked as a doorman and plumber in a Catholic hospital, where he remained until his retirement. In 1963, Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner, his landlords, discovered the artist’s autobiography, which contained more than two thousand pages, as well as his fictional work – In the Realms of the Unreal – inspired by American Civil War narratives and other great battle and adventure texts. Darger incorporated events and characters from his own life into his fictions. The work was accompanied by several hundred large-scale illustrations. Darger used tracing paper, watercolors and graphite to execute his drawings. They consisted of images from popular culture, reproductions of battle scenes, and illustrations.
Guo Fengyi
China, 1942-2010
Born in 1942 in Xi’an, she began making art in her late forties, after debilitating arthritis forced her into early retirement from a job at a chemical fertilizer plant. To alleviate her chronic pain, she turned to qigong – an ancient Chinese wellness and healing technique that combines coordinated movements, breathing and meditation. Producing an astounding repertoire of work over the last two decades of her life, Fengyi created more than 500 complex ink drawings on subjects ranging from Chinese cosmology and mythology to traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy. Many of Guo Fengyi’s early drawings – including the Diagram of the Human Nervous System and The Liver Meridian Diagram – carefully map the anatomical systems that the artist intuited, rather than actually seeing them.
Albino Braz
Brazil, 1893-1950
We know little about the life of Albino Braz before his confinement in the psychiatric hospital of Juquéri, in São Paulo, which specializes in the treatment of schizophrenia. Apparently, he was of Italian origin and his first contact with drawing occurred after his hospitalization. His work is mostly made up of drawings executed in graphite or colored pencils on paper where scenarios in which male and female figures prevail and coexist with identifiable or imaginary animals. The compositions have a particularity: the main character, usually highlighted by his position or the size he occupies in the paper, manifests dominance over the other character(s) represented.
Ana Carrondo
Portugal, 1967
Ana Carrondo began showing signs of instability around the age of seventeen and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She attended occupational therapy workshop at the Instituto Condessa de Rilvas, in Lisbon. She participated in several exhibitions with her tiles, which are part of private and museum collections.
Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern
Lithuania, 1892 – Germany, 1982
Born in Prussia in 1892, Schröder-Sonnenstern lived a difficult childhood and everything else that is said about his adult life is pure speculation. According to some people, he lived under the pseudonym of Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern, an ostensibly charlatan doctor who deceived several wealthy patients and who shared his profiles with the most disadvantaged. Schröder-Sonnenstern’s enigmatic and highly erotic drawings were recognized by the French Surrealist group, who included his work in their exhibitions. His fantastical images with voluptuous women and fleshy male partners are marked by a paradoxical lyricism that often seems to be at odds with his frankly lascivious investigation. Filled with demons, skeletons and other outrageous figures, Schröder-Sonnenstern’s work bears the stamp of social parody.
Gabriel Bien-Aimé
Haiti, 1951
A former student of sculptor Janvier Louis-Juste, Bien-Aimé is known for being one of the finest sculptors of cut metal. Mixing voodoo and Christian themes, his work is distinguished by its sculptural relief made using techniques such as the bending of iron and the addition of metallic pieces. He participated in the famous exhibition “Les Magiciens de la Terre” and his work has been exhibited internationally, namely at the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Grand Palais, the Abbaye de Daoulas, the Halle Saint-Pierre, the Fowler Museum, the Musée du Montparnasse and the Queens Museum of Art. His works are in the permanent collections of the Center Pompidou, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Waterloo Museum, the Figge Art Museum, Le Center d’Art and the Musée d’Art Haïtien du Collège Saint-Pierre.
Giovanni Battista Podestà
Italy, 1895 – 1976
The social and political circumstances of the first half of the 20th century profoundly marked the life and work of Giovanni Battista Podestà as much of his work reflects the uncertainties, insecurities and changes that defined that period. In a first phase, Giovanni Podestà devoted himself to oil painting, representing mostly religious motifs and landscapes. Later, he began to create sculptures in high and low reliefs using various recovered materials, such as fragments of mirrors, paper or metal. Podestà’s work is marked by religious and popular symbolism and can be understood as a manifesto against the loss of some spiritual values due to the materialist values that began to emerge associated with the growing consumer society.
Giovanni Bosco
Italy, 1948–2009
In his cramped room, Giovanni Bosco spent hours painting on pieces of cardboard a graphic universe of rare power, composed of parts of the human body, such as the heart, an arm, a leg, the lungs, sometimes accompanied by bone and muscle structure. They occasionally have inscriptions in which the author mentions, among other things, his identity, his year of birth, that of his father, as well as the names of Italian cities or Sicilian villages. He painted the walls of his room, and then the figures that emerge from his brush assume bigger dimensions, sometimes reaching the human scale. Giovanni Bosco marked his passage through the streets of Castelmezzano del Golfo, where he lived, with oil paintings on the walls of the town, thus appropriating the public space and escaping the deprivations and wretched conditions in which he lived.
Daniel Gonçalves
Portugal, 1977
Born in Porto, Portugal, in 1977, Daniel Gonçalves is a self-taught designer and painter with a deep genuine artistic vein. This quality, combined with a hyperactive personality, led him from a very young age to understand the world and relate to it through plastic expression, having participated in multiple collective exhibitions held in the area of Porto in the last decade. In his trajectory, in the search rich in experimentation for a personal brand, regardless of the multiplicity of styles, he always showed a particular attention to the play between shapes and colors.
Janko Domsic
Croatia, 1915-1983
Little is known about Janko Domsic’s life or the circumstances of his arrival in France. He spent some time in prison and, in 1935, worked on the construction of a railway line. In Paris, where he lived in precarious conditions, Domsic drew and wrote with colored pencils, ballpoint pens and markers. His drawings contain numerous texts in French and some in Croatian and German. With the exception of a few references to his personal life, Nazi songs and religious texts, his vocabulary essentially refers to mystical ideas, the Freemasons’ moral code and economic issues. Its figures, extended to the limit in lines that unite and form labyrinths, are decorated with pentagrams, swastikas and hyphens.
Marilena Pelosi
Brazil, 1957
Marilena Pelosi was born in 1957 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She began drawing at the age of sixteen after succumbing to a serious illness. Pelosi was an only child and her parents were Catholic before converting to a voodoo cult. At the age of twenty, she left Brazil to travel to Europe and India, having settled in France. Cataleptic characters, mutilated and penetrated bodies, endless transporters, and human-headed bee armies are her most frequent topics. Marilena feels that her work is similar to the creation of spirits, both due to its mysticism and its unpredictability: she claims that she never plans a creation in advance – it is her hands that guide her. For Pelosi, the pleasure of revealing a scene through her imagination is the meaning of life.
Miroslav Tichý
Czech Republic, 1926 – 2011
The work of Miroslav Tichý, discovered in 1989 by his neighbor, the director Roman Buxhaum, reveals the unique talent of a figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the communist period from its beginnings in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s. Tichý got his start in photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it and building his own machines and magnifiers from shoeboxes, cans, recycled glass and other discarded materials. His images, captured with manually made machines and improvised optics, offer an extraordinary vision of an eroticized reality, simultaneously real and dreamlike. Tichý’s work was first shown at the Seville Biennale in 2004 and later in a solo exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris in 2008.