How do we feel joy?
The artists of the Între Spații project came together to shape the next art intervention in the hospital.
What is outsider art?
From the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s collection to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut: where outsider art comes from and how it is seen today.
Beyond conventional art circles there is a form of expression called outsider art, or art brut. It brings to the fore creators we often do not know about, or are slower to discover: artists who build a visual language of their own, independent of schools, movements or conventions, and who create on their own, outside the usual cultural circuits.
These creators first drew attention in the early 20th century, when doctors began to document carefully the works made in psychiatric hospitals and observed how the act of creating became a vital means of expression.
The turning point came in the 1920s, when the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn assembled a remarkable collection of such works and published a book that influenced the European avant-garde.
Inspired by this vision, the artist Jean Dubuffet gathered, in the 1940s, works by self-taught creators and by people from marginalised backgrounds, calling them art brut for their pure sincerity. Later, in 1972, the critic Roger Cardinal proposed the term outsider art, strengthening its international recognition.
Today, the contemporary art scene is rediscovering outsider art not as a curiosity on the margins of society, but as a living, dynamic space, open to dialogue and to a diversity of forms of expression.
This is where Asociația Vizibil stands: an organisation that supports under-represented people in making their voices heard through art and in taking part in cultural life.
