Paris gets an insider's look at Australian Outsiders

Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007, 10:45 PM by Lonely Planet

At the Halle St-Pierre - 'the best gallery of its kind' in Paris's artistic Montmartre arrondisement is an Australian exhibition that you probably haven't heard about, of an art movement you may not be familiar with, but which warrants and rewards a closer inspection until 11 March 2007.

Outsider Art, or Art Brut (Raw Art) generally applies to the artistic creations of people at the fringes of art production - the institutionalised, the sometimes-psychotic, the marginalised and the self-taught - those who usually receive scant attention from the artistic establishment. This exhibition is the most significant grouping of Australian Outsider Art in almost two decades.

The show started life at the Orange Regional Gallery in regional New South Wales and travelled straight to Paris, bypassing Sydney spaces such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, probably because of the difficulty in getting Outsider Art acknowledged by mainstream art institutions.

It's tempting to get caught up in the act of trying to capture what this art is with labels, but it's more important to experience it for yourself - you'll know it when you see it, as thousands of Parisians and visitors to the city have discovered when they venture off the more typical museum trail in this most art-loving European cultural capital.

According to Philip Hammial, one of the original curators of the ORG show, the difference between Art Brut and 'art therapy'' (which it is often confused with) is that with Art Brut, the artists 'aren't doped to the eyeballs, and therefore the Art Brut is more intense'.

The artists include Janine Hilder, Claire Saint-Claire, Travis Mitchell, Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Mannix and Stavroula Feleggakis and works range from elaborately detailed illustrations on paper to Javier Lara-Gomez's dollhouse-like creations of buildings in a variety of materials. Of the 20 artists whose works are displayed at the show, six have had offers to show at other Parisian galleries.

Packed, protected and freighted without any funding from the Australia Council, the show is a testament to creative drive and artistic energy without interference. To get there, alight from metro station Anvers and walk straight up rue de Steinkerque to place St-Pierre.

- Sally O'Brien

Labels: Europe, Festivals and events

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