Artists Naïve art
Jan Balet was a German/US-American painter, graphic artist and illustrator. Affected by the style naive art he worked particularly as a graphic artist and as an Illustrator of children's books. Besides this he painted pictures in the style of naive art. Referred to as a "naïve" painter, his works exhibit a dry wit and refreshingly candid, satirical view of life.
Hans Baluschek, full name Alphons Anton Alexander Hans Ernst Karl Maria Baluschek, was a German painter, graphic artist and writer, representative of the New Materiality style.
Baluschek studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, and in 1900 became a member of the Berlin Secession, a group of artists that also included Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, and Wassily Kandinsky. Baluschek was always socially critical, which was reflected in the subjects of his paintings. Many of his paintings are dedicated to the working class of Berlin, he addressed the gray everyday life of Berlin: gray air, gray walls, gray people. Baluschek is often categorized as a German Expressionist because of his emotional style, but his style has something of New Objectivity, Impressionism, and naive painting. He also drew illustrations for the popular children's book Little Peter's Trip to the Moon, and collaborated with periodicals as an illustrator.
World War I instilled patriotic feelings in Baluschek, and he painted a number of subjects on this theme. After the war, he joined the Social Democratic Party and became involved in labor movements. In 1926 he helped establish an artists' relief fund and later became director of the annual Berlin Exhibition. The German Nazis, who came to power in 1933, declared Baluschek a Marxist and a "degenerate artist," suspended him from all positions, and banned him from exhibiting.
Issa Abasovich Barkhanoyev (Russian: Исса Абасович Барханоев) was a Soviet and Russian Ingush artist of the last quarter of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is known as a painter, draughtsman, landscape painter, genre painter and poet, a self-taught artist.
Issa Barkhanoyev created more than 500 paintings during his career, in which, according to critics, he skillfully conveyed his deep thoughts and feelings through images and symbols, and these works of art epitomize spirituality and life philosophy. The works of the folk artist are in museums of the Republic of Ingushetia and private collections.
Gary Bunt is a British self-taught artist known for his paintings of the English suburbs and countryside. He took up art to overcome a serious illness. Gary Bunt in a primitive style, with sophisticated simplicity and good humor depicts ordinary life with its simple joys.
David Butler was an African American sculptor and painter from Good Hope, Louisiana. His style is epitomized by kinetic sculptures made from recycled tin or wood, which he embellished with saturated colors and geometric patterns. His work is now in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
James Castle was an American artist born in Garden Valley, Idaho. Although Castle did not know about the art world outside of his small community, his work ran parallel to the development of 20th-century art history. His works have been collected by major institutions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Castle's work which toured nationally in 2008-09. Castle's work entered the international arena with a major exhibition in Madrid, Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2011 and was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. In 2014 The Smithsonian American Art Museum featured their recent acquisition in the exhibition Untitled: The Art of James Castle and the Whitney Museum of American Art included their acquired collection of Castle's work in the 2017 exhibition Where We Are.
Henry Joseph Darger was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15.145-page fantasy novel manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor illustrations for the story.
The visual subject matter of his work ranges from idyllic scenes in Edwardian interiors and tranquil flowered landscapes populated by children and fantastic creatures, to scenes of horrific terror and carnage depicting young children being tortured and massacred. Much of his artwork is mixed media with collage elements. Darger's artwork has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
Arthur Dial is an American painter and sculptor living and working in Bessemer, Alabama. He is a part of the Dial family of artists, which include his older brother, Thornton Dial, and his nephews, Thornton Dial Jr., Richard Dial, and Ronald Lockett.
Dial created reliefs and paintings that narrowed in on a specific moment within the broader narrative that he wished to convey. He uses these moments, such as Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit or "George Wallace blockading the entrance to the University of Alabama in Montgomery," to highlight historical or folkloric moments of extreme tension. Dial's focus on scenes of conflict in humanity's real or imagined history come from his direct observation of southern life throughout the 20th century. He describes his narratives as "a record of what went by".
Henry Dieckmann was a German self-taught painter known for his genre naive paintings.
After World War II, Dieckmann worked at the German Federal Railroad factory in Verden and observed life around him. His paintings are imbued with nostalgia for the recent past; they illustrate the everyday life of ordinary people in their spare time with typical European cityscapes.
Thomas "Sam" Doyle was an African-American artist from Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. His colorful paintings on sheet metal and wood recorded the history and people of St. Helena’s Gullah community.
Doyle's paintings and sculptures are held in the permanent collections of American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Penn Center (Penn School on St. Helena Island).
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.
Minnie Eva Evans was an African American artist who worked in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Evans used different types of media in her work such as oils and graphite, but started with using wax and crayon. She was inspired to start drawing due to visions and dreams that she had all throughout her life, starting when she was a young girl. She is known as a southern folk artist and outsider artist as well as a surrealist and visionary artist.
Madge Gill was a British artist.
Gill was born into a large family and was raised in poverty. She suffered from various health problems throughout her life, including blindness in one eye and later the loss of her son, which led her to experience bouts of depression.
Despite her challenging circumstances, Gill was a prolific artist, creating thousands of drawings and embroideries over the course of her life. Her work was often inspired by spiritualism and included intricate and highly detailed patterns and symbols.
Gill's work was first discovered by chance in 1963, two years after her death. Her work has since been exhibited in major galleries and museums around the world, including the Hayward Gallery in London and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.
Today, Gill is considered an important figure in the history of outsider art and is celebrated for her unique and distinctive style. Her work continues to inspire and captivate art lovers and collectors around the world.
Lee Godie (born Jamot Emily Godee) was an American self-taught artist who was active in Chicago during the late 1960s until around the early 1990s. She was a prolific artist who was known for her paintings and modified photos which are shown in galleries and museums such as the Hayward Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is often considered Chicago's most collected artist.
Oska Gutheil is a German painter. Oska Gutheil is regarded as a new star in the art world: galleries in metropolises such as New York, Berlin and Vienna are vying for the artist's pictures, who combine naïve painting with punk and comic elements. Oska Gutheil creates colourful, crazy worlds full of hybrid creatures – and with it his own biography.
Hector Hyppolite was a Haitian painter. Considered as the "Grand Maître of Haitian Art".
Hyppolite, a prolific painter, typically depicted Vodou scenes and created between 250 and 600 paintings during the last three years of his life. Much of his work was influenced by his devotion to his work as a priest.
John Kane was an American painter celebrated for his skill in Naïve art.
He was the first self-taught American painter in the 20th century to be recognized by a museum. When, on his third attempt, his work was admitted to the 1927 Carnegie International Exhibition, he attracted considerable attention from the media, which initially suspected that his success was a prank. He inadvertently paved the way for other self-taught artists, from Grandma Moses to Outsider Art. Today Kane is remembered for his landscape paintings of industrial Pittsburgh, many of which are held by major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Iosif Artemievich Karalyan was a Soviet artist, member of the USSR Union of Artists and Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR.
Karalyan's creative work is a kind of nostalgia for the country of childhood, which you can visit only in dreams and imagination, as it no longer exists, because childhood of every person, like his era, is unique, the unrepeatable sensations experienced, they are preserved visually only in the fine arts.
His works are kept in the Museum of Modern Art (Yerevan), National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan), State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow), home-museum of Hovhannes Tumanyan (Yerevan), the funds of the Ministry of Culture of Armenia and numerous private collections in Armenia and abroad.
Franjo Klopotan is a Croatian surrealist painter.
Klopotan is considered a master of naive art in postwar Croatia. He began painting in 1959 and had his first solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1963. Later, during his stay in Germany, participating in exhibitions, he gained international fame.
Franjo Klopotan is a painter of waking dreams, bringing elements of surrealism and popular fantasy into his work.
Klopotan was a member of the Croatian Society of Naive Artists, the Croatian Society of Fine Artists and the Association of Croatian Artists.
Boris Nikolaevich Koshelokhov, known in artistic St. Petersburg under the nickname Bob, was a Soviet and Russian avant-garde artist.
Boris Koshelokhov was the organiser of a group of non-conformist artists called "Letopis", which represented an extremely heterogeneous spectrum of directions: from extreme expressionism to primitivism.
Nikifor Krynicki, born as Epifaniy Drovnyak, was a Lemko naïve painter. Nikifor painted over 40,000 pictures – on sheets of paper, pages of notebooks, cigarette cartons, and even on scraps of paper glued together. The topics of his art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Underestimated for most of his life, in his late days he became famous as a naïve painter.
Robert Kushner is an American contemporary painter who is known especially for his involvement in Pattern and Decoration. He has been called "a founder" of that artistic movement. In addition to painting, Kushner creates installations in a variety of mediums, from large-scale public mosaics to delicate paintings on antique book pages.
Jean-Marie Lamare is a Flemish primitive painter of today, a rare master of tempera. This technique inherited from the great Flemish Masters surprises with its particular luminosity. The compositions of J. M. Lamare transport us to a fantastic world.
Torborg Lindberg-Karlsson is a Swedish artist and sculptor.
She created wood-carved and painted sculptures depicting people in Nordic costumes, mostly from the Sami culture. She also carved church jewelry and utensils.
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.
Baya Mahieddine (Arabic: باية محي الدين) or Fatima Haddad (Arabic: فاطمة حداد) was an Algerian artist who is best known for her vibrant and colorful paintings that often featured bold shapes and figures. At the age of sixteen Baya had her first exhibition, in Paris, where she gained notice from renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso and André Breton.
Baya's work is often associated with Surrealism, as she was heavily influenced by Breton and other Surrealist artists. However, she also drew inspiration from traditional Algerian art and culture, incorporating elements such as calligraphy and geometric patterns into her work.
Throughout her career, Baya's work was exhibited in Algeria and France, and she received widespread critical acclaim for her unique style and approach to painting. In addition to her paintings, she also created tapestries, ceramics, and other works of art.
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.
Manuel Mendive Hoyos is one of the leading Afro-Cuban artists to emerge from the revolutionary period, and is considered by many to be the most important Cuban artist living today.
Mendive's work incorporates several art mediums and genres. His art consists of drawing, painting, body painting, wood carving, sculpture, and performance that integrates loosely choreographed dance with rhythmic music.
Mendive's art is strongly influenced by the Santería religion. In fact, Santería permeates every form of his art from body painting to events performed in public spaces.
María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca, also known by her pen name Nahui Olin, was a Mexican artist, model and poet.
Carmen Mondragon was associated with the avant-garde movement, known for her unconventional lifestyle and outspoken nature. Her contributions to Mexican modernism and her role as muse to famous artists and writers further cemented her status as a cultural icon.
Nahua Olin's personal life and relationships were equally unconventional. She had affairs with famous artists, including Diego Rivera and Gerardo Murillo (Dr Atl), which influenced her artistic expression and worldview. Her exploration of love, desire and identity through her art and personal experiences has made her a symbol of female empowerment and sexual liberation.
Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Similar to other self-taught artists, Sister Morgan used simple forms to depict the human figure. Her works are characterized by their lack of the use of formal techniques such as perspective and definition of light and shadow, giving them a flat, two dimensional quality. She painted and drew using acrylics, tempera, ballpoint pen, watercolors, crayon, colored and lead pencils and felt tip markers. Using inexpensive materials she had at hand, Sister Morgan painted on paper, toilet rolls, plastic pitchers, paper megaphones, scrap wood, lampshades, paper fans and styrofoam trays. The fact that she was self-taught, coupled with her choice of materials as well as her style and subject matter have led her to be characterized as a naive, folk, visionary, vernacular and outsider artist.
Curt Mühlenhaupt was a German artist He was a prominent figure in the post-World War II art scene in Berlin and is known for his distinctive style that combined elements of figurative and abstract art.
Mühlenhaupt's work often depicted the everyday life of Berliners, especially those living in the working-class neighborhoods of the city. He was interested in the contrast between the dilapidated and gritty aspects of the city and the resilience and humor of its inhabitants. His paintings and drawings were characterized by bold, thick brushstrokes and a vibrant use of color.
In addition to his paintings and drawings, Mühlenhaupt was also known for his work in other mediums, such as printmaking and photography. He was a prolific artist, producing a large body of work over the course of his career.
Today, Mühlenhaupt's work is held in collections around the world, including the Berlinische Galerie and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
