In our search for satisfactory answers to ever more complex questions, intellectual and logical arguments often seem inadequate. If thinking is to be successful, it must be preceded by perception. And it is art which shows us the best path to perception.
Our book is an expression of a deep and long-standing respect for Art Brut. This special art is increasingly becoming a mirror of the dramatic developments in today‘s world. The publication therefore focuses on the artists themselves, 19 women and 43 men.
From Gugging to Chandigarh, Hannah Rieger’s journeys take her around the world in search of Art Brut, or Outsider Art. In fact, these are not just geographic journeys, but journeys to other worlds, with very different kinds of lives, ideas, and art.
Maria Gugging is a town not far from Klosterneuburg and home to an Art Brut center that has been in development since the 1960s. There are more representatives of this unaffected art form living and working here than in any other part of the world.
In Anti-Oedipus (1972; English edition 1983), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari analysed the structures of that hidden art in the depths of the human soul as being responsible for the unconscious production of our desires: desiring machines, producing a wild kind of thought which works in an associatively pictorial way by producing hybrid connections between colours, shapes, images, between emotions and thoughts, inorganic and organic life etc. Quite as if the primary wish of desiring machines was the linking of each and everybody.
This very special art, which I have been collecting for the past 25 years now, has become the world I live in. That means I am living in around 400 works of Art Brut. The core of my collection, about two thirds of the works, consists of art from Gugging. The rest comprises international pieces of Art Brut. I have a flat in Vienna and a house in the Weinviertel in Lower Austria.