(Featured Image: Carlo Keshishian, Over-Load)
It is an exciting month ahead at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester this October as we see the opening of three exhibitions focusing on the work of outsider artists, or those who face barriers to the mainstream art world. The triennial competition, Outside In: National, will showcase works by selected finalists who submitted their work the competition earlier this year. Accompanying this ground-breaking exhibition will be a chance to see the fascinatingly diverse work of Pat Douthwaite and (for the first time in the UK in almost 50 years!) a major review of the work of Jean Dubuffet: father of Art Brut.
Outside In: National
27th October 2012 – 3rd February 2013
‘A Ground-breaking open-entry exhibition for artists producing work from the edges of society. The exhibition will showcase 80 works by over 60 artists selected from pieces submitted to the Outside In: National competition over the past year. From substance misusers to self-taught visionaries, the exhibition will provide a unique insight into the extraordinary breadth and vitality of work produced by individuals from outside the mainstream art world.’
Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision
23rd October 2012 – 3rd February 2013
Despite an introduction to painting by J. D. Fergusson, whose wife Douthwaite had studied mime and modern dance with, Douthwaite was for the most part a self-taught artist. Because of this, she is often associated with Outsider Art in spite of her regular exhibition schedule. She was controversially not interested in establishing a place within the cultural mainstream and was always comfortable being linked to the term Outsider Art; her early work was even influenced by pioneer of Art Brut, Jean Dubuffet. Douthwaite lived a predominantly disorderly lifestyle; a lifestyle that involved a lot of travel and a lack of a permanent base or studio from which to work. Douthwaite worked in a variety of media including collage and assemblage, making her work as colourful as her semi-nomadic life.
Learn more about Douthwaite’s life and work in the Pat Douthwaite ‘Step Up’ pack. Step Up is an innovative project that offers training for marginalised and outsider artists, enabling them to feel more confident delivering workshops and conducting in-depth research: www.pallant.org.uk/docs/stepupdouthwaitelowres_0.pdf
Jean Dubuffet: Transitions
20th October 2012 – 3rd February 2013
Transitions will be the first major review of Dubuffet’s work for almost 50 years in a UK institution. Organised with the assistance of the Fondation Dubuffet in Paris, the exhibition will feature key paintings, drawings and sculpture from collections across France and the UK.
Born in Le Havre in 1901, Dubuffet ran his father’s wine business for 17 years before returning to painting in his distinctively simple, primitive style. Dubuffet himself was fascinated by the work of children and the insane, eventually leading him to coin the term Art Brut in 1945, which translates as ‘Raw Art’. In 1949, Dubuffet produced a manifesto entitled Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts, in which he intended to ‘valorise the idiosyncratic creative works of individuals which he considered to be outside “the system”,’ but to also ‘directly challenge and undermine the authority of “high culture” and conventional definitions of art.’ [Karen Jones et al., Framing Marginalised Art, 2010, p 11].
By emulating the ‘crude, violent’ energy of the work of children and the ‘clinically insane’, Dubuffet soon had the term he coined applied to his own work, ‘rather than to their stylistic source as he had intended.’ [http://www.dubuffet.com/bio.htm]
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