beyond the boundaries season 2008

Johann Korec grows up in institutions for homeless youths. After attending a school for retarded children, he works as a laborer at a farmstead. He is committed to Gugging mental hospital in 1958. Since 1981, he lives and works there in the House of Artists. He had already begun working artistically in the 1960s. Based on copies of illustrations that appeared in newspapers, and over several years time, he develops an independent painting technique of his own. His ink and aquarelle pictures primarily depict loving couples and erotic scenes, which can be interpreted as an illustrated diary.

For half a century, French mediumistic artist Henriette Zéphir devoted herself entirely to her “inner guide”, for who she never stopped creating. Her drawings have us captivated in their singular overall composition, but also in the force of their details. Somewhere between pointillism, geometric abstraction and Fauvism, her work reflects an enlightened modernism. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet, as early as 1967 she was presented at the historical art brut exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Today, her work can be seen among the greatest collections of art brut in the world.

Henry Speller was born in the settlement of Panther Bum in the Delta country of Central Mississippi. He grew up working on Delta where he often drew pictures during his lunch breaks. In 1939, he left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee. Speller moved to a house located a few blocks from Beale Street, the musical heart of Memphis. He was an accomplished blues musician who played guitar with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. The imagery and insistent rhythms of the Delta blues flow through Speller’s work, but his iconography is an explicit commentary of the social, economic, and racial exclusions he observed throughout his life.