William Hawkins 1895 - 1990
Untitled (Black, Grey, and White Buildings), ca. 1983-85
Enamel on found wood panel
40 1/2 x 38 in / 102.9 x 96.5 cm
SOLD

William Hawkins (1895-1990)

Born in rural Kentucky, Hawkins moved north to Columbus Ohio in 1916, where he lived for the rest of his life. He held an assortment of unskilled jobs and only began painting in the style for which he is best known until the mid to late 1970s. He worked almost without letup thereafter, in spite of illness and advancing age.

To accompany the artist on his walks through the streets of Columbus was like following an experienced prospector in search of gold. Hawkins’s selective eye seized images from newspapers, magazines, and advertisements, which he habitually salvaged from dumpsters and kept in a suitcase for reference and use in his works. He combined these images with his own recollections and impressions to create a vivid picture gallery of animals, American icons (such as the Statue of Liberty and the Chrysler building), and historic events. Although the artist could barely read and write, he transformed words themselves—usually his signature and birthplace and date—into powerful graphic elements.

Hawkins’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2018, “William L. Hawkins: An Imaginative Geography,” a comprehensive exhibition including 60 of the artist’s most important works and an accompanying catalog, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art—later traveling to the Mingei International Museum (San Diego, California), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, Iowa), and the Columbus Museum in Georgia.

Leopold Strobl (b. 1960) 

Strobl was born in Mistelbach, Lower Austria in 1960. He has devoted himself exclusively to art for almost 40 years, and has been a guest of the Open Studio program at the Gugging Art Brut center in the outskirts of Vienna for more than 16 years. He draws in the morning and single-mindedly finishes a new piece per session. This impetus is significant both in terms of form and content: the artist's works are generally no bigger than 8 ½ inches on the longest side and can be almost as small as a postage stamp; they come to the artist as little visual epiphanies and strike the viewer with this poetic immediacy.

“Strobl’s process is a seamless, multilayered appropriation and alteration of a photographic base. It starts with combing through the local newspapers for evocative images that will lend themselves to the transformation that is to come. Strobl then scissors these images out of their original context and backs them with clean drawing paper. We know the steps that follow and the simple materials utilized (graphite and colored pencils), but not in what order, or if there is one--as the artist doesn't speak of it or allow onlookers when he is working … Depending on the disposition of the underlying clip, he traces over certain outlines--topographic features, horizon lines, architectural details, winding perspectival lines--and if there are figurative elements that don’t fit into the artist’s vision, he encloses them in graphite, like an insect spinning a cocoon, or a minimalist reducing a representational image into a basic shape” (Alejandra Russi)

John Tursi (b. 1961)

Tursi is one of the artists working at The Living Museum, a unique atelier housed in a former kitchen hall at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, NY—where artist patients and out-patients work on their oeuvres without constraints. The Living Museum was founded in n 1983 by the late Bolek Greczynski, an artist, and the Hungarian psychologist Dr. Janos Marton, who remains at its helm as director and curator.

Tursi works across media to manifest the images that he sees within a book that exists in his mind’s eye. Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote in 2002:
 

“The artist who comes closest to genius status here is John Tursi, whose scroll-like drawings cover the walls of a large double-height gallery. They dazzle.

Using mostly the shapes of triangles, French curves and other drafting tools, Mr. Tursi has devised a vocabulary at once organic and geometric that sustains endless variations. With it, he has created a universe of acrobats engaged in all kinds of intimate acts that remain more engaging for their decorative power than their naughtiness.

These figures evoke the coiled energy and perfection of Indian art—specifically the erotic intertwinings of temple sculpture and the saturated palette of Indian miniature painting.”

screen-top

Martín Ramírez (1895 - 1963)

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Ramírez is widely known as one of the preeminent self-taught masters of the 20th century. Thrust by political and religious upheavals caused by the Mexican Revolution and seeking to support his family, Ramírez relocated to the United States in 1925. He worked as an impoverished immigrant in the California mines and railroads until he was picked up by police in 1931—reportedly in a disoriented state. He was committed first at Stockton State Hospital and then at the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where he spent the rest of his life. It was there where he discovered art and created the complex and compelling drawings for which he is known.

Over the course of his life, Ramírez produced around 500 works. The imagery is often reminiscent of his own life experiences: Mexican Madonnas, animals, cowboys, trains, and landscapes merge with scenes of American culture and create a profound documentation of a Mexican living and working in the United States. Compositionally, he renders space into multi-dimensional layouts, often using rhythmic repetition and gentle shading. Later in his life, he incorporated collage into his works, adding newspaper clippings and previous drawings for depth and texture.

In 2015, the United States Postal Service released a set of 5 commemorative “Martin Ramirez” Forever stamps, which marked the first time that an Outsider artist and a Mexican immigrant was featured on a USPS Stamp.

Grant Wallace (1868 - 1954)

Wallace was born in Hopkins, Missouri, one of 9 children. He set out for New York City at age 19, where he studied and developed his interest in the occult. Wallace eventually made his way to California, where he worked as an editorial illustrator and reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. He graduated to editorial writer for the Evening Bulletin and covered the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 among a group of war correspondents that included Jack London and Richard Harding Davis.

Just before World War I, Wallace settled with his family in Carmel, California, where he began experimenting with telepathy, or what he referred to as "mental radio.” Over the next two decades, he channeled his visions and messages into elaborate portraits, texts, and complex diagrams and calculations. Through his work, Wallace endeavored to prove reincarnation, extraterrestrial life, and the coexistence of the living with the dead.

Only ten works by Wallace have been previously seen by the wider public. They were exhibited between 1997 and 1998 at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore as part of The End Is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia and are illustrated in the eponymous catalog, published by Dilettante Press. The exhibition and publication were curated and authored by Roger Manley.

Bill Traylor (ca. 1854-1949)

Although emancipated as a boy, Traylor continued to labor until 1908 on a neighboring plantation in Benton, Alabama—near where he was born into slavery.

By 1910 he was a tenant farmer near Montgomery and it was only when he was in his eighties, and no longer able to do physical work, that he started making art with materials that lay to hand, learning to write his name so he could sign his work. From 1939 to 1942, Traylor produced more than 1,200 drawings that are of crucial significance in American art and social history and brought to life a world of chicken stealing, hunting, plowing, preaching, drinking, arguing and testifying, as well as many vivid representations of the animal world. His technique developed rapidly; from the use of simple geometric shapes to complex abstract constructions.

Traylor’s posthumous recognition has expanded steadily ever since his death in 1949, and today his work is in important private and museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and the Smithsonian Museum (Washington D.C.).

Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930)

A former indentured farm laborer committed to an insane asylum for most of his adult life, Wölfli's meticulously hypnotic drawings, literary epics and musical compositions comprise a vast oeuvre that writer and theorist André Breton called one of the three or four most important in the 20th century.

Born in Bern, Switzerland on February 29, 1864, Adolf Wölfli endured a traumatic youth: abused, orphaned, moved between a series of state-run foster homes, and contracted out to the lowest bidder as a child laborer. He briefly joined the army before twice being convicted of attempted molestation and admitted to the Waldau Insane Asylum, where he would spend the remainder of his days. Some years after his commitment he began to draw, encouraged in this new pursuit by his psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler, who later published Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). Morgenthaler’s writing brought Wölfli's work to the attention of the outside world, including André Breton, Surrealism's chief theorist, and Jean Dubuffet, the founder of the Art Brut movement within which Wölfli's idiosyncratic creations would later be situated. Wölfli's magnum opus was a semi-autobiographical saga, which he profusely illustrated with complexly involuted drawings that incorporated intricate figuration, geometric patterns and passages of text and musical notation. This 25,000-page work, which has been compared to later Outsider artist Henry Darger's colossal, illustrated manuscript In the Realms of the Unreal, occupied Wölfli until his death at Waldau on November 6, 1930.

top-align