THIS IS THE PLACE FOR DISCOVERIES AND DISCUSSIONS OF THE MOST INVENTIVE ART FORMS – ALL KINDS OF ART THAT IS FAR-OUT, FANTASTIC, FREE-SPIRITED, FUN, FUNKY, PHENOMENAL AND GOOD FOR THE SOUL.
RECENT FEATURES
**ROB OBER: NO IDEOLOGY, PLEASE. THIS ART IS REAL.
“I am suspicious of art informed or directed by ideas or any ideology,” the American artist Rob Ober says. Keeping it real, authentic, shot through with a real pulse, and wildly colorful, Ober’s work feels irresistibly spontaneous and fresh. See. React. Paint. Here, the artist, who grew up all over the place, shares some thoughts about his art. Note to self: We’re in love with those gators. Click here to see article.
**JAMAICAN INTUITIVES: IT’S RAS DIZZY’S WORLD
Ras Dizzy (circa 1932-2008) was one of the most important of the Jamaican Intuitives, a group of self-taught artists whose works began to earn recognition in Jamaica in the late 1970s and notably contributed to shaping a sense of the postcolonial, independent island country’s national cultural identity. A selection of Dizzy’s works from a unique private collection. Click here to see article.
**A BIG, BOLD NEW BOOK: FRANÇOIS JAUVION’S TRIBUTE TO ART BRUT AND OUTSIDER ART MASTERS
In 2020, the French artist François Jauvion’s large-format book L’imagier singulier was published. It featured his own illustrations and texts by various specialists about the lives and accomplishments of numerous art brut and outsider artists. Now, a second volume of Jauvion’s big opus is here. See our overview of L’imagier singulier, Tome 2. Click here to see article.
**ARTIST CATHY WARD: IN LONDON, THE PSYCHIC, SOULFUL MESSAGES OF “THE ORACLES”
Like many art-makers, what with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic period and other concerns, the London-based artist Cathy Ward, who works in various media and genres, has wrestled with numerous, big challenges. Recently, as if purging the negative energy surrounding her, Ward sat down in a corner of her home to create a series of bold, mystical paintings. “They allowed me to reset myself,” she says. See a portfolio of these powerful new pictures. Click here to see article.
**PHOTOGRAPHER JOEL SIMPSON: CAPTURING NATURE’S BIZARRE CREATIVE SPIRIT — AND POWER
The photographer Joel Simpson travels widely in search of unusual natural rock formations and strange textures in the surface of the earth. Here, a selection of new photos from Simpson’s latest expeditions to the Southwest of the U.S.A. illustrates a theoretical approach he has developed to appreciating such striking images. As he notes, it leads viewers “from traditional landscape through abstraction, figuration, and finally to fiction." Click here to see article.
**OFF THE WALL: NEW YORK CITY STREET POETS AND VISIONARIES, THE KENNETH GOLDSMITH COLLECTION
In the 1980s, Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and university professor, began tearing off anonymously made, handwritten ads, religious-themed proclamations, and oddball declarations that he found posted on walls and lampposts on the streets of New York City. A bemusing selection of such bizarre “poetry” was recently shown at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Click here to see article.
**GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: EMMANUEL HERZ’S JELLYFISH INVASION
Earlier this year, at the café/restaurant Remor in Geneva, Switzerland, we stumbled upon a stunning display of Emmanuel Herz’s festive “Fascinantes Méduses” (“Fascinating Jellyfish”), a group of sculptures and paintings that had taken over the old joint’s ceiling lamps and walls. We were smitten — and maybe also bitten. See out photo-filled report. Click here to see article.
ASHTON HERRES: DRAWING ON SCI-FI, JAZZ, AND OTHER SOURCES — AND DRAWING OUT IN PUBLIC, TOO
Little New Hampshire was too small for the young artist Ashton Herres, who arrived in New York City about two years ago and has thrown himself into art-making, using one of downtown Manhattan’s liveliest, most popular parks as his open-air studio. His partly abstract, partly fantastical drawings are packed with unusual characters and sprawling, throbbing organic forms. See our introduction to this emerging image-maker’s still-evolving, singular style.
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SELF-TAUGHT PAINTER MAURY ORNEST: FINDING A REFUGE IN ART-MAKING
Maury Ornest was a self-taught artist who was born in 1960 and lived in Los Angeles; his abiding passion was baseball, a game he played as a young man in the minor leagues. A serious injury ended Ornest’s athletic career, and later, he experienced a psychotic break. He went on to become a painter and focus on his art until his death in 2018. Now, his sister has catalogued Ornest’s many paintings and other works, and the filmmaker Ted Haimes has made a docu-film recalling the isolated artist’s life and achievements. See brutjournal West Coast Bureau Chief Sarah Fensom’s art-filled report.
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MICRO MEETS MACRO IN OLIVIA MUNROE’S ABSTRACT COMPOSITIONS: CIRCLES, CIRCLES, CIRCLES
Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the American artist Olivia Munroe has for many years worked in an abstract mode in which pure, simple form has played a big role. Her main compositional element: circles. After many decades living and working in Connecticut, near Long Island Sound, during the recent pandemic period, she moved to New Mexico. Now, even as she continues reacting to the sensations of her new, adopted region’s big sky and dry landscape, Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque is presenting a mini-survey of her works from the past several years as part of a two-artist exhibition. See our art-filled report.
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MATTHIAS KORB: A GERMAN ARTIST PACKS ALL OF THE WORLD — AND MORE — INTO AN OLD, REIMAGINED FARMHOUSE
In a farmhouse in a small town near Frankfurt, the German artist Matthias Korb has produced “INITIUM ET FINIS,” an ever-evolving work-in-progress that may be seen as a visionary, site-specific other world. Here, art-environment specialist Jo Farb Hernández and Korb introduce this spectacular, mixed-media concoction in a photo-filled report. Regarded by its maker as a kind of “holistic organism,” Korb’s vast creation gives tangible — and daunting — expression to the artist’s combined and overlapping aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical sensibilities.
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FRANCES SMOKOWSKI’S OTHER WORLDS: ENTER THE MYSTERIOUS SPACES OF THE “EFFICACIES” AND THE “AETHERSCAPES”
“Efficacies & Aetherscapes,” Frances Smokowski’s just-closed solo exhibition at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York, featured two series of the artist’s strange — and distinctive — pencil-on-paper, biomorphic drawings. Her images of mysterious vegetal growths and otherworldly viscera, whose thickets of pods and sacs churn in rhythmic compositions or float gently and individually against white backgrounds, are wonderfully bizarre. See our art-filled report about these remarkable works, which Smokowski creates in a meditative state, allowing them to evolve spontaneously and organically.
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Click to see past articles. Newest articles followed by older articles, listed according to their publication dates.
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