Animalistic Naïve art
Marcel Dzama is a contemporary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings. Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media. Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and following for his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds.
Judith Linhares is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings. She synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor. In the early 1970s, Linhares created narrative drawings and assemblages that appropriated commonplace or "craft" materials and feminine imagery (flowers, eggs, swan feathers, domestic scenes). After 1980 she developed a Symbolist allegorical world of enigmatic, bulbous-headed creatures, narcoleptic nudes, phantasms, figures in boats, and human metamorphosis. Her fantastic imagery was balanced by lush color, painterly sensual surfaces, and sure design. Through the 1990s, critics noted in her work a sunnier palette, increasingly abstract and ambiguous imagery, and a growing facility with a naïve drawing style. In the 2000s, Linhares has turned to female nudes (often monumental), visionary landscapes, floral still lifes and animals. Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions and major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Frederick James Lloyd was an English artist. He became famous for his paintings, mostly of animals and country landscapes.
He was the first living self-taught artist to have a painting hung at the Tate in London, titled Cat and Mouse.
Gilbert Lujan was an American sculptor and muralist. He is better known in professional circles under the pseudonym "Magu".
Magu's work became popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s for its use of colourful imagery, anthropomorphic animals, lowrider images of outrageously proportioned sizes, decorated with overlapping indigenous motifs (cities, graffiti), Dia De Los Muertos installations, altars and all manner of pop culture borrowings.
Salomon "Sal" Meijer was a Dutch painter, primarily known for his paintings of cats and Amsterdam city views. Works by Meijer are on view at the Jewish Historical Museum and the Kattenkabinet cat museum in Amsterdam, among others. In his youth, he worked in the diamond industry while studying art. He devoted himself full-time to painting in 1914. His first one-man exhibition was in 1926. Meijer's work was included in the 1939 exhibition and sale Onze Kunst van Heden (Our Art of Today) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Due to the simplicity of Meijer's paintings and his modest attitude - he did not regard his paintings as works of art but as craftmanship - his work was often labeled as "naive" and "primitive". However, a re-evaluation of his work began in 1957 with the article by Kasper Niehuis.
Maria Oksentiyivna Prymachenko (Russian: Мария Авксентьевна Примаченко) was a Soviet and Ukrainian artist of the twentieth century. She is known as a bright representative of primitivism. Self-taught Maria Prymachenko painted more than 800 paintings during her long life.
Maria Prymachenko drew inspiration from folk folklore and filled her works with symbolic content. She achieved international recognition early on, but refused to move to the capital and lived all her life in her native village. In addition to painting, the artist was fond of embroidery and painted ceramics, as well as illustrated books by Ukrainian writers and poets.
People's Artist was in favor of the authorities. She was awarded with numerous honorary titles, orders and medals. Maria Prymachenko was constantly visited by well-known cultural workers. Her paintings were constantly exhibited at international exhibitions. Most of Prymachenko's paintings are now kept in the National Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art.
Eun Nim Ro is a South Korean artist who has worked in Germany.
She moved to Germany as a nurse in 1970, where she had the opportunity to exhibit her first works and receive art education. Eun Nim Ro developed an intuitive style of painting that combined Korean brush and ink drawings with the expressiveness of Western art. Naively drawn signs of fish, birds, trees and human figures became the artist's symbols. Eun Nim Ro's creative work is not limited to painting, she has also worked in other disciplines such as performance, calligraphy, painting, ceramics or installation. She has designed the windows of St. Johannes Church in Altona, among others, as well as light walls for government buildings in Seoul.
In 1990, Eun Nim Ro took up a professorship at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. In 1995, the artist became an honorary citizen of Seoul, and in 2015 she was also awarded the title of professor in Korea.
Francisco Benjamín López Toledo was a Mexican Zapotec painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. In a career that spanned seven decades, Toledo produced thousands of works of art and became widely regarded as one of Mexico's most important contemporary artists. An activist as well as an artist, he promoted the artistic culture and heritage of Oaxaca state. Toledo was considered part of the Breakaway Generation of Mexican art.
William Traylor was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. Born into slavery, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper. It was only after 1939, following his move to Montgomery, Alabama, that Traylor began to draw. At the age of 85, he took up a pencil and a scrap of cardboard to document his recollections and observations. From 1939 to 1942, while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, he produced nearly 1 500 pieces of art.
While Traylor received his first public exhibition in 1940, it was not until 30 years after his death that his work finally began to receive broader attention, in the late 1970s. Recent acceptance of Traylor as a significant figure of American folk and modern art has been founded on the efforts of Charles Shannon, as well as the evolving tastes of the art world. Shannon, who first encountered Traylor's work in 1940, brought Traylor to the attention of the larger art world. Traylor now holds a central position in the fields of "self-taught" and modern art.
Raymond-Émile Waydelich is a French-Alsatian painter, sculptor and action artist. He lives and works in Hindisheim/Alsace.
Waydelich's extensive oeuvre includes paintings, sculptures and sculptures in ceramic or bronze, assemblages, works on paper as well as public art actions and performances. The artistic techniques of his colourful, playful, witty and whimsical graphics range from drawing, watercolour, lithography, etching and monotype to overpaintings of found paper objects.
He is one of France's best-known living artists. His works are in numerous public and private collections worldwide. His watercolour collages have become particularly famous, showing real-life creatures (crocodile, cat, pig) ghostly alienated within landscapes, which the artist painted on antique letters, some of which he acquired on journeys (e.g. to Crete). His style, which often takes up perspectives, motifs and elements of prehistoric cave paintings or Greek mythology, approaches fantastic realism.
