The Marvelous Madness of Aloïse

Aloïse Corbaz lived a life outside the margins. Institutionalised, alone, and without any training, her deeply individual artworks were both a product of and a comment on her struggles with mental illness. Within the walls of a Swiss asylum in early 20th century, Corbaz was extremely prolific. She used unconventional materials like toothpaste, flower petals,…

Inside a Secret Paris Atelier of Curiosities

Behind what might be the narrowest door in Paris, at the back of a peaceful courtyard, I could hear the faint sound of a radio crackling as I approached the end of a corridor, hoping I’d found the atelier of Maïssa Toulet. I had found a photograph of her work on Tumblr and tracked her…

Memories of a Lost Valley: 5,000 Photographs Discovered in an Attic

Between 1900 and 1930, a poor and destitute seed pedlar took more than five thousand photographs of daily life in an isolated valley of the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of the Alps. Roberto Donetta can now be considered one of Swiss photography’s great outsider artists, but when he died in debt, solitude and misery in 1932,…

Artist of the Week: A Janitor’s Mysterious Masterpiece

James Hampton’s magnum opus was discovered posthumously in a rented garage he had converted into his studio. The installation features over 180 individual found objects, mostly collected from dumpsters on his way home in the early hours after midnight, when he would clock out from his janitor duties at the GSA in Washington DC. The…

Artist of the Week: Harlem’s Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin was an artist who was gifted with the ability to express his work with an unrefined social realism and dreamlike playfulness of touch that in reality, would mask a darker narrative. The grandson of African American slaves and a decorated World War One veteran who was registered as disabled after being wounded in…

Meet Mrs. Madge Gill: The Outsider Artist Who Painted through the Spirit World

“Mediumistic Art.” It’s something we’d never heard of, until we uncovered the mysterious world of Mrs. Madge Gill. One of history’s most important outsider artists, Madge tended to her garden, her husband, and her children in what appeared to be the quiet life of a London housewife. But one day, she felt a stirring to…

Who’s Afraid of Adolf Wölfli?

Some artists leave us tangled legacies– reputations tied up in creative theft, family feuds and unresolved estates. Others, like Adolf Wölfli, leave us a veritable Pandora’s Box for consideration. At a glance, Wölfli’s work oozes the sentiments of Psychedelic art; its kaleidoscopic swirls of colour look fresh off the Haight Ashbury, circa 1967. In truth,…

A Brief Compendium of Tramp Art

What shall we keep a keen eye out for at our next expedition to the flea market? Tramp Art! No I haven’t just insulted you, I’m talking about the little-known and often misunderstood branch of outsider art; curiously whittled wood works intricately carved from discarded cigar boxes – that’s right, cigar boxes. This humble and…

What David Bowie Learned from the Gugging Psychiatric Institution

By 1994 David Bowie’s musical career was in a bit of a quiet phase, let’s say. He hadn’t managed to recreate the massive success of his 1983 album Lets Dance. Ziggy Stardust had long since departed back to the cosmos, The Thin White Duke had been retired, and Bowie’s latest incarnation, Tin Machine, had disbanded.…

The Fantastical World of Mingering Mike, the Imaginary Legend of Soul

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and…