PARIS.- Conceived as an invitational exhibition within the 2020 Outsider Art Fair Paris, Sexual Personae will examine representations of women in the work of different generations of male, female, and gender-nonconforming self-taught, outsider and art brut artists from across the world. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the exhibition brings together a panoply of iconic examples of archetypes from Outsider Art: from Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls to a contemporary Madonna by Elisabetta Zangrandi, to Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s pin-up photographs of his wife.

According to Carl Jung, our human collective unconscious is populated by archetypes and universal symbols. Whether trained or untrained, artists frequently draw from this collective unconscious when creating their iconography and their representations of female subjects often revert to these shared paradigms: Mothers, Queens, Seductresses, Maidens, Crones, Huntresses, Witches, Goddesses, Whores and Schoolgirls among them.

Where academically trained artists will have studied drawing with nude models and centuries of art history of the female form, outsider artists are almost never inspired by these formal traditions and conventions. Without the influence of the Academy or the watchful social mores of mainstream art institutions, one could argue that an outsider’s conception of “woman,” femininity, and gender is much less burdened than that of modern and contemporary artists.




The lived experience of self-taught artists is transferred directly onto their images of women—think for example of how Mose Tolliver’s whimsical and sometimes erotic pictures of women with their legs spread upside down are drawn from his own severe injury, when his legs were crushed by load of marble in a factory accident. Likewise, Janet Sobel, a Ukrainian Holocaust survivor whose drip painting technique directly influenced Jackson Pollock, is known for her primitivist figuration and fantastical scenes of the female existing harmoniously with nature–an escape from the trauma of her youth.

The exhibition spans generations, continents, and regions, including iconic artists from the European art brut cannon as well as influential figures from the folk art movement of the American South. Purvis Young viewed pregnant women as a source of salvation and painted them frequently throughout his lifetime in an expressive style akin to early paleolithic depictions of the Venus. New discovery Andrew LaMar Hopkins tackles the complexity of Creole identities and the antebellum history of the Gulf States in the American South, often injecting overtly homosocial scenarios or references to queer culture.

What emerges in the work is how these artists propagate these archetypes and simultaneously deconstruct and problematize them. Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s nude portraits of his wife and collaborator in a classic pin-up style can be interpreted as a tribute to a powerful, sexual goddess; while Morton Bartlett’s black & white portraits of anatomically correct dolls are both provocative and innocent.

Sexual Personae will offer an unbridled exploration of these representations—hopefully prompting surprising moments of convergence and rupture while celebrating fantastical and imaginary iconography that transcends them.