Catalogues

An Exquisite Realm: The Art of Freda Kohler

2022

The German artist Freda Köhler produced a body of compelling visionary paintings and drawings. Only a fraction appear to have survived. She signed her works, ‘Sieg-bert’, which in old German means ‘bright victory’; a sign of the revelatory messages in her art and, perhaps, the name of her spirit guide. It is tempting to read her untitled portrait drawing of a woman (fig.1) as either a selfportrait or a visionary likeness of Sieg-bert. The titles written on the front of many of the works, and the hand-written ‘explanatory’ text on the verso of some of them, certainly strongly suggests a mediumistic source. Botanical forms dominate (figs.2-5). They metamorphose and reveal cosmic messages. They are similar in many ways to much work from 20th Century Central European spiritualist circles, by artists like Anna Häckel, Anna Zemánková and Cecilie Marková.

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Windows Onto the Infinite: Margot

2019

Margot is among those rare individuals who abandons the familiar life, the everyday employment she has been immersed in, to answer a greater calling. In 2014 her life changed radically when this young woman gave up her job as a florist in provincial France, took a new name and began to draw, as she recounts “…all day. This energy was like a torrent, indeed it was frenetic and furious”. This compulsive creative impulse has never left her and she draws every day. There are remarkable similarities in her story with those of two classic art brut outsiders, the mediumistic artists Madge Gill and Augustin Lesage, both of whom were likewise inspired by energies and forces beyond their recognition or understanding. These works are doors, or windows into other realms or worlds, and just being in their presence enables the viewer to commune with her psychic experience, with the monumental complexity of her images and with her message, which is, she says, of a oneness and a connectedness embracing all humanity and nature. Colin Rhodes, author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives 60 pages, full-color, hardcover. Printing is on-demand through Blurb.

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The Visionary Art of William A Hall

2016

William A. Hall spent two decades of his life homeless. More than half of that time he lived in a car. Yet remarkably out of these conditions he produced a substantial body of important artwork. Built on the common units of standard sketchbook sheets Will produced a complex array of single and multiple panel images that speak of optimism, safety and survival. Every picture has its own story and relates to things that are happening around him in his life at each moment. Will’s images of landscape, constructions and retrofuturistic vehicles essentially grow out of his subconscious and are given form by the creative act of drawing.

60 pages, Full -color hardcover, with an essay by Colin Rhodes.

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Soul Gatherer: The Primal Art of Richard C. Smith

2014

Richard C. Smith’s marvellous images are a revelation. They grow out of an ancient Earth that most of us can only guess at. Densely realised, intense and direct, his work belongs to that pantheistic place where even inanimate matter has life force. In this domain humans cling together in the face of some unknowable, but ever-present world-spirit. In his drawings he is a most subtle and beguiling colourist, while his sculptures are grittily direct. Smith is an important artist who is a fellow voyager with the likes of William Blake, Anselm Boix-Vives, Miguel Hernandez and Asger Jorn. 60 pages, hardcover, with an essay by Colin Rhodes.

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The Restless Line: Images from Exile by Mehrdad Rashidi

2012

Mehrdad Rashidi was born in the town of Sari in Northern Iran in 1943. At the age of 20 he fled Iran because of his strongly held political views and settled in Germany.

In 2006, for no particular reason, he began to draw. He found it relaxed him and made him feel happy, he also thought of his homeland, his childhood and easier times in his life whilst hj doodled on any piece of paper that came to hand. Using old notebooks, enveloped, shopping receipts and discarded advertising pamphlets, he gradually, in what seems to be an obsessive and compulsive surge of creativity, began to produce an extraordinary, and hauntingly beautiful body of work. This outpouring has continued to this day, the momentum, and the joy it has given the artist have not ceased.

60 pages, full color, hardcover with dustjacket.
Introduction by Roger Cardinal
Essay by Colin Rhodes.

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The Art of George Widener

2009

Henry Boxer Gallery presents the first book about recent discovery, the savant artist George Widener. His extraordinary detailed drawings are filled with numbers, numerical palindromes, calendar calculations, shipwrecks and invented cities. Renowned critic of outsider art Roger Cardinal provides the essay. 80 pages, hardcover with dustjacket. Essay by Roger Cardinal

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