FLYING HIGH. Women Artists of Art Brut
Exhibition on show from 15 February to 23 June 2019
Pictures are available for royalty-free use in editorial reporting
“FLYING HIGH” is the first exhibition that is devoted “globally” to female positions in Art Brut produced from 1860 until the present. The exhibition “flies high” in every sense: it has gathered together 316 works by 93 women artists from 21 countries, which in many aspects of content and aesthetics challenge our idea of what art is.
The exhibition adopts the term Art Brut – “raw art or outsider art” – defined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945 as starting point for the primordial, non-academic art produced outside the cultural mainstream. The diversity and heterogeneity of the works being presented in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien demonstrate clearly that the scope of the Art Brut concept today has over time encompassed far more than works of the mentally ill; it also includes the production of “mediumistic” (spiritualist) women artists, “lone wolves” and women artists with disabilities. This broadening of scope derives not least from the radical change in psychiatric medicine and its institutions – from formerly closed buildings to more open structures and even their dissolution. Contemporary Art Brut emerges today to a great extent from studios or from the structures created by the artists themselves.
