The Outsider Art Fair has become a meeting place for European collectors and confirms the appeal of contemporary art for what has long been a niche sector. Drouot hosted a round table on the subject.
Kwame Akoto, aka Almighty God (b. 1950), If I were God, 2018, painting on wood, 122 x 76 cm. Artpool Project, Paris.
Courtesy of Artpool Project, Paris
The choice of date—the FIAC fringe, when Paris gets in tune with the world of contemporary art—is not insignificant in the frenzy of major fairs around the world. The Outsider Art Fair has been in this niche since its creation in 2013 and is surfing on the media attention that art brut has received in the past 10 years, following the growing number of exhibitions in major institutions. Curators take their works and compare them with those of artists on the contemporary circuit without making any difference. The boundary between them is getting blurry. How they are seen is changing.
Floating Labels Not all of the 40 or so galleries at the Outsider Art Fair (almost half of them French, five American, three Italian, one Indian) are exclusively dedicated to art brut : for example, newcomer James Barron Art (Kent), which incidentally sells works by Jean Arp, Anthony Caro, Mattia Bonetti or Jim Dine in the United States. Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim is at Lawrie Shabibi (Dubai) after completing a residency at the Consortium art centre (Dijon) and founding the Khorfakkan Art Centre (Sharjah) in 1997. Abdelmalek Berhiss was represented by the 5 Contemporary gallery (Paris) until 2017, alongside Françoise Schein or Pedro Castro Ortega, and now exhibits with the new…
com.dsi.gazette.Article : 10513
This article is for subscribers only
You still have 85% left to read.
Print the article
