The Gemeentemuseum The Hague has organized an exhibition about Outsider Art. There is no conclusive definition of the phenomenon.
Is it art by mentally disturbed people? Well, apart from what mentally disturbed exactly is, many of the presented artists are not or were not.
You might call it work caused by obsession instead of artistic merit. But that is just not true, and does the making of art not need a kind of obsession?
One could even call it art that has been systematically kept outside the art historical discourse, which isn’t completely true either. Also many works are intellectually sound and their sometimes intensive manual labour isn’t therapeutic (although it may have worked like that) but constructive.
The present exhibition shows works ranging from naive to intellectually challenging and from very humoristic to extremely sad. I’ll leave you just with the pictures, undisturbed by my comments.
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I don’t quite understand what NAPAKU’s aka Piet van den Heuvel’s work is doing in this show. (I wrote quite extensively about his work in 2012 here – in Dutch)
(Click on the pictures to enlarge)
Bertus Pieters
“conclusive definition of the phenomenon.”(see above):
tried to formulate answer in http://kdoutsiderart.tumblr.com/dragermeurtant.
French phrase: l ‘art singulier, is also to the point.
mes regards,
Drager
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