Parallel Visions. Modern Artists and Marginal Art

The exhibit gets underway with Paul Klee and Surrealism with his piece on psychological automatism and the subject-creator; Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut theorist and founder of the museum that goes under the same name; the members of theCoBrA Group with their approach to New Primitivism; Alfonso Osorio, the bridge between Europe and the USA, and the Chicago Group. It comes to a close with contemporary artists such as Anette Messager, Christian Boltanski and Donald Baechler. It shows how the interest that causes each artist to consider the creative worth in madness and even promote the work of marginal artists is different. While some recognise the formulation of spontaneous language that gives rise to subjective and intuitive impulses, others, Salvador Dalí for instance, with his conquest of the irrational, look to rigourously control the creative process and understand it as: “The transcription of an imagined reality that occurs previously in the artist's mind, or hallucinations in the case of psychiatric patients”, in the words of Roger Cardinal. Years later German Neo-expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorf substantiate the art of psychiatric patients as a paradigm of transgression used as a type of critique about modern culture.

In this, an osmosis between modern artists and marginal art, the exhibition unveils a kind of continuity in formal aspects, recognising them as the dominant language, together with assemblage and object art, and a figuration intersected by Surrealism and Expressionism.