YIA

After a troubled childhood and a turbulent adolescence, August Walla was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was finally admitted - along with his mother - to the Gugging hospital, near Vienna, in 1970. Resident of the Haus der Künstler (house of artists), he will remain there for the rest of his life. Expressing himself through photography, installation, diversion of objects and typing of manifestos, writing and drawing have become inseparable in his work. A key figure in art brut, collected by David Bowie, Walla is present in a number of collections around the world, including those of the MoMa (New York) or the Milwaukee Art Museum (Wisconsin).

More than twenty years ago, Harald Stoffers began a fictional correspondence with his mother, in which all the letters started with «Liebe Mutti». He began this exercise at a workshop for people with disabilities at which he worked. He started by distributing them amongst his fellow workers in the form of small torn notes. Stoffers’ letters later thickened, some even reaching ten meters long. Presented in a film by Youssef Tabti at the Grand Palais in 2009, his work was included in such prestigious institutions as the Mona (Australia), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Berlin), the Oliva Creative Factory (Portugal), the Dox Art Center (Prague) and the Maison rouge (Paris).
A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

The Uruguayan gardener, Alexandro García, began to transcribe his ethereal visions following an encounter of the third kind - or avistamiento - that he experienced as a child. Worthy heir to magical realism, however, he goes beyond its scope: he speaks to us of an elsewhere offered to our projections and to the colonization of a new humanity through inhabited and saturated architectures. Present notably in the abcd/Bruno Decharme collection (France), his work was shown in the exhibition Elévations in 2015, co-curated by Antoine de Galbert, and tribute to the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a fairy tale palace built by the postman Ferdinand Cheval in 1879.

A frequent visitor to the Blu Cammello workshop in Livorno, he was first discovered by artist Riccardo Bargellini. The hybrid sculptures he produces are made up of heterogeneous objects whose fates are inexorably linked, observed sometimes through the prism of their transitional, fetishist or apotropaic value.
Present in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Pompidou) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, his works have been shown in several major exhibitions, notably at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
“These works are endowed with a symbolic power that many ‘professional’ artists are incapable of achieving. “(P. Dagen, Le Monde)

This Californian artist, who died in 2010, had a degree in chemical engineering. Fascinated by meditation and metaphysics, he sought to unravel the mysteries of existence through formulas and numbers drawn from his own history. This “conceptual brut” artist sometimes photocopied his work to distribute it to as many people as possible. In 2014, Daniel Baumann introduced him to the 548 Center in New York. The following year, we entrusted Gael Charbau with writing an essay and curing the monographic exhibition held at the gallery. In the same year, Alfred
A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.