Edmund Monsiel

In the last two decades of his life the Polish outsider Edmund Monsiel, an untreated schizophrenic, produced a body of exquisitely detailed drawings, often with messianic and religious inscriptions. Though he held down a job as a weighbridge operator after he became ill he avo!ded social contact and was obsessively religious. His artistic outpourings began with transcriptions of visual hallucinations of Christ and the Devil in 1943, before giving way to chaotic agglomerations of figures and faces that seem suggest the artist's struggle with forces that threaten to consume him entirely. Subsequently Monsiel developed a more rigidly defined and controlled image of a world minated by the human face. Characteristically, Monsiel's drawings reflected the deific world of his visions in which he was God's emissary, rather than the dingy reality the small room in which he lived, and thereby quieted the powerful forces of his fears. Control was achieved partly through the. annihilation of pictorial depth and its placement by his own marks. Despite their hieratical nature, Monsiel's pictures seem to throb with an innate life; his figures and disembodied physiognomies are elusive, ways suggesting nascent metamorphosis.

taken from http://www.outsiderart.co.uk/monsiel.htm

In relation to being polish and during wartime.

Harald Stoffers

Use of writing in his works.

Often talks about his everyday-life, he works at Elbe-Werkstätten GmbH (an employment and rehabilitation centre in Hamburg, Germany for people with disabilities) and writes about it in most every piece of text (or letter as they are often refereed to).

Most letters are written to his mother but never make it to her, but into other peoples hands or left lying about.

His work looks almost organic.

Anthony Mannix

Using his unconscious, he references Aborigine art.

Anthony Mannix uses whatever comes to hand and creates alot of journals.

Judith Scott 1943-2005

Saw Judith Scott's work at the Museum of everything a couple of days ago.

Judith Scott is classed as outsider art as he was downs syndrome and deaf and had her own free flow way of creating works with wool, found objects and other yarns.

This short preview of a documentary on her on youtube is quite interesting.

Christof Mascher

Christof Mascher was born in 1979 in Hannover, and lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany. In the past two years he has had solo museum shows at Galerie der Stadt Remscheid, and at the Museum for Modern Art, Goslar.

Mascher's paintings are residues from a subconscious process that guides his work. Heavily influenced by David Lynch's account of steering one's own dreams - "I like to plunge into a dream-world which I myself have created or discovered, a world I have sought out for myself" - Mascher is motivated by capturing or constructing such fantastical narratives in his paintings. As a self-proclaimed child of the 80s, certain iconography and inspiration arises from various characters such as Skeletor, Jabba the Hutt, and the Super Mario Bros. Interested in how fantasy allows the surreal to emerge into life, such creations are integrated into Mascher's pictures on horizontal layers that sweep through his works. This stage-setting is crucial, forcing the viewer to navigate and weave through the paintings as one would do in vintage video games, platforms that were ultimately built in 2D.

Yet Mascher's work can also be seen in the tradition of Northern European landscape painting. While one notices an appreciation of naïve art or the Primitive, it is clear that Friedrich's expansive vistas, the composed fantasy of Paul Klee, the hybrids and creations of Bosch, the clash of man and nature seen in Nolde, and the masking and huddling of figures employed by James Ensor, are all continuously present. This fusion of contemporary iconography with references to the past, aligned to the variation of materials he uses, allows for an individual kind of research where Mascher can develop what he calls his "secret knowledge". It is here where he finds a connection with Maya Deren's 1943 classic, 'Meshes of the Afternoon', and the energy it seeks to express, specifically in how it is "concerned with the interior experiences of an individual, recording an event which cannot be witnessed by other people."\

Taken from Sacchi