The open art museum St.Gallen shows art that is difficult to grasp. The museum collects, preserves and communicates Swiss “Naive Art“, “Art Brut” and “Outsider Art” by contemporary and deceased artists. The artists represented in the museum are amateurs and self-taught artists without academic artistic training. At least three temporary exhibitions and one collection exhibition are shown each year.

What is “Outsider Art”?

The term “Outsider Art” (in the sense of outside the art world) goes back to the British art historian Roger Cardinal (1940-2019). Although originally intended as a translation of “art brut” in 1972, the term “outsider art” was quickly adopted. In contrast to Jean Dubuffet‘s narrow definition, Cardinal understands this art more broadly and less ideologically. The term “Outsider Art” can therefore be better applied to contemporary art. Dubuffet admired the raw expressiveness, spontaneity and independence from art fashions or technical rules. He saw them as true art – untouched by commerce, academicism or social calculation. Roger Cardinal used the term “Outsider Art” to expand Dubuffet’s “Art Brut” and opened it up to works that were created outside the mainstream but did not necessarily come from psychiatric contexts.

“Outsider Art” in the broader sense

“Outsider art is a fascinating area of the art world that shows how deep, expressive and meaningful works that are not created within established systems can be. It challenges traditional notions of art, talent and recognition – and reminds us that creativity is everywhere. The expression places the social status of the artists at the center of consideration, without deriving from it the maxim of anti-cultural art, the claim to unspoiled, unconsumed nature of the corresponding art products. The ultimately volatile term Marginal Art is aimed at their marginalization in the art market. The term “naive art” implies a certain attitude of expression, a certain view of the environment characterized by childlike innocence, as it were. The term condition-bound art and the term Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, which is no longer used today, refer to art products by people with a mental disability or mental illness and are therefore essentially congruent, even if the ideas of what constitutes a mental illness have changed to some extent between Prinzhorn and Navratil. The term visionary art focuses on pictorial content and refers not only to paintings by self-taught artists, but also, for example, to those by recognized surrealist painters. Most paintings by amateur artists can be categorized under two or more of these terms. There are also overlaps of a stylistic or sociological nature with other artistic movements and art forms, such as peasant painting, Art Informel, street art or graffiti.

Exemplary artists

• Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), Switzerland: Psychiatric patient who created his own fantasy world in the asylum with complex image-text collages.
• Henry Darger (1892-1973), USA: Lonely janitor who secretly wrote a 15,000-page epic with color illustrations about child wars.
• Martín Ramírez (1864-1942, Mexico/USA: migrant in a psychiatric institution, drew detailed tunnel and equestrian motifs from his inner experience.
• Judith Scott (1860-1961), USA: Deaf artist with Down syndrome who created sculptural objects from yarn and found materials.