Claus Mueller

The 27^th edition of the Outsider Art Fair (OAF) was held at the Metropolitan Pavilion from January 17-20 with more than 2,500 attendees at the opening of the fair. The fair mostly featured  North American and international artists working in the  tradition of raw art (originally called Brut by Jean Dubuffet),  self-taught art,  spontaneous creativity, and productions created outside of established networks of distribution and instruction.  67 exhibitors from 37 cities in seven countries where showcased and 8 first time galleries participated. Reactions by gallery owners to the fair were mixed. Just Folk sold two works by the well-established outsider artist Bill Traylor for $85,000-$100,000 each and some first time exhibitors reported positive reactions to their collections, though no sales. Some galleries reported ongoing sales negotiations and others had revenues comparable to prior participations in the outsider art fair.  Others reported a flat or smaller market compared to past years.  An overall assessment is difficult because there is insufficient shared data. This year again showcased the fair’s curated spaces, presenting Good Kids: Underground Comics from China with zines and original drawings by Chinese artists and an homage to the late Phyllis Kind, the first American dealer to show outsider art alongside contemporary art.

OAF was established in New York in 1993 by Sandy Smith with an emphasis on self-taught art by established artists and the work of contemporary figures.  The fair is credited for expanding the market for outsider art and garnering it more acceptances in the contemporary art world.  OAF was acquired in 2012 by the gallerist Andrew Edlin who added the curated space and talks programs, tripling prior attendance records, and establishing an OAF in Paris where it just had its 6^th edition. Between 2015 and 2017, the audience for Paris OAF increased by 30%.  In New York, attendance reached 12,000 in 2017 and has grown since according to OAF. Outsider Art has become an established sub-field in the art market as Christie’s Outsider Art exhibition, now in the fourth year, clearly shows.  

The Outsider Art market continues to grow. More collectors are participating in Christie’s outsider sales, contrary to their traditional focus on Post-War, Contemporary, and Modern Art. This is in part prompted by museums and gallery exhibitions as well as by the higher prices achieved at auctions that have made outsider art more visible. At Christie’s, the estimated price range for the January 2019 Outsider Art auction ranged from $700 to $ 500,000 with the top sale reaching $684,000.  Overall sales by Christies at the 2019 Outsider Art auction set a new record of $4,261,625.

At the Outsider Art Fair this year John Foxell’s MEMENTO MORI, from Staten Island Arts, a startling work was offered for $3,500.  It figures a real skull in an assemblage, resting on an ornamental reddish cloth with a blueish cap next to a green hand within a colorful Asian shrine. It expresses, as did many other works at the art show, an attraction to the bizarre and the macabre. Like other art makers on show, John Foxell was an avid collector of found objects, including many toys and dolls from children and household gadgets which he used for his miniature sculptures and collages.

The American Robert Kippur, who passed in 2015, was completely a self-taught artist living in isolation and working during the day as a bus driver. He was one of the best known artists presented at the show by The Humbaba Fine Art Gallery. His larger painting, ACE OF DIAMONDS, 1980 uses broad brush strokes and vivid colors to created disoriented, mutilated, mostly nude, female bodies in frightening poses that express despair and agonical  sentiments far from harmony and peace.   His nightmarish paintings in vibrant colors are contemporary expressionistic visions of individuals driven by fears and anxieties. ACE OF DIAMONDS was priced at $40,000.

Among  the best formally excited and overwhelmingly  artistic presentations was the triptych  OBAKE (specter) created  by  Yuchiro Uka in 2017 with markers, colored pencils, and ink on cardboard with meticulously overlapping drawings of symbolic images, animals and small figures with esoteric motives filling the space. His work is rigorously controlled with utmost attention to each detail and was presented by Tokyo’s Yukiko Koide in booth 1. Uka’s creation sold for $36,000 on the opening day. Stephanie Wilde, a well-known artist whose work has been shown since the late 80’s in one Person and numerous group exhibitions can be found in many collections. Over the same period she received numerous awards and published several limited editions portfolios.  I was drawn to her work given its thematic orientation and masterly execution and composition. Her WORDS a 13” by 13” sized presentation executed in acyclic ink, gesso, and gold leaf on museum board shows one large and numerous small faces against a quilted rectangular patterned background. Their mouths are wide open in fearful expression, possibly screaming and frightened by black crows that surround the faces and seem to attack.  WORDS is part of Murder of Crows, a body of work Wilde has been completing since 2015. In her words “Murder of Crows is a body of work that speaks to the polarization of race, religion, and political views with a visual subtext of the historical pattern of prejudice.  The title is an emblematic reference to flock behavior, herding and the mob mentality that so often accompanies such actions.” Her superb work contrasts strongly with the large number of spontaneous, found, improvised, and playful works on display in the outsider and raw art tradition.  Wilde’s work WORDS  would have been well placed at  the parallel Outsider Art show at Christie’s and was brought to the fair by the Steward Gallery from Boise,  Idaho and priced at $16,000.

Whenever I attend the Outsider Art Fair I check out the booth by Mariposa Unusual Arts. Their booth holds a treasure trove of intriguing works from the Caribbean, Latin America, and other regions that expose unique works of art by self-taught artists, spontaneous folklorists, and works which are not produced by individuals having art markets in mind. Here the numerous visitors of the booth can find works in all differed styles, in all sculptural and painterly configurations, and pieces which are relatively affordable, with prices ranging from several hundred dollars up to $5,000. The wooden Indonesian funerary effigy statue carved in 1940 was sold by the gallery for $2,200.    

Claus Mueller   filmexchange@gmail.com