Art Brut Gallery In Lublin

The idea to establish Galeria Art Brut was inspired by the life and work of Dominika Mendel – a 31-year-old autistic woman from Lublin who, since a very early age, has been communicating with the world through meticulous and highly imaginative miniature drawings, which later in her life developed into multidimensional paintings. Her art has always been driven by an overwhelming need that stemmed to an equal extent from the artist’s particular life situation and an inherently powerful creative desire.

The key premise of Galeria Art Brut in Lublin can be boiled down to the following sentence: as long as disability is not stigmatised, it can easily accommodate the artistic gateway to the personal and social independence of people otherwise often excluded from social interactions due to their otherness.

It is a well established truth that finding meaning and significance in one’s life is among the most fundamental human needs. It is also a common source of frustration observed, in various forms and to a varying degree, in many disabled persons. There is an inherent cognitive craving, a longing for meaning that strongly affects those excluded by their inadvertent otherness. If that desire can find its outlet through artistic expression rather than being pigeonholed and neglected, it becomes a potent foundation for a renewed sense of personal freedom, while the contact with audiences provides the admiration and applause that no artist has ever been able to go without.

They need not search for their own, unique touch, their individual style. They find it almost effortlessly,’ observes Professor Aleksander Jackowski, who has been actively involved in the popularisation of the naive arts in Poland since 1956. The art-brut genre is usually far removed from professional art, hence it is entirely free of trends, it creates no “schools”, fuels no academia. There are only artists and their works – the focus is solely on the art and motivation stems directly from the ability and desire to create. The language of art becomes a tool of the artists’ self-expression, and many art galleries throughout Poland are actively involved in facilitating such artistic endeavours, e.g.: “Tak” in Poznań, “OTO JA” in Płock, “Apteka sztuki” in Warsaw, “Pod Sukniami” in Szczecin, Galeria Art Brut in Wrocław, Galeria d’art Naif in Kraków, and Galeria Art Brut in Lublin.

The involvement of the Lublin Municipality, the Centre for Culture in Lublin, and the Lublin Theatre Therapy Foundation, in the Galeria ArtBrut project, constitutes an element of the ongoing cooperation between NGOs, local governments, academic circles and cultural institutions, aimed at advancing scientific and artistic endeavours as a new and more effective direction in overcoming the sense of powerlessness and stagnation that commonly affects those residents of Lublin who struggle with disabilities in their everyday lives. We hope that the “Galeria Art Brut” project will meet with considerable interest from the disabled artists themselves, as well as various artistic and cultural institutions, art schools, as well as Lublin’s educational and psychological circles.

The disabled often find themselves trapped in a sense of derivative powerlessness: their artistic expression is often evaluated through the prism of therapeutic achievement rather than actual talent or passion, which is bound to lead to a sense of frustration. Although the value of therapeutic endeavours aiding the development of a disabled person cannot be overestimated, it is vital that we stop perceiving such art as in any way separate from that created by able-bodied artists - the only truly viable criterion applicable here is whether the art is good or not. Disability is merely another aspect of life, one that can in fact, especially in this context, surpasses the so-called normality. The amateur works presented at the Gallery include naive, art brut sculpture and painting, which will introduce the viewer to a wealth of original authors creating outside the mainstream and well-established trends, somewhere on the outskirts of the currently prevalent styles and conventions. It is art that is still widely underappreciated, artificially set apart from more traditional forms, art which - despite its undeniable quality – has yet to reach wider gallery-going audiences. The works are commonly confined to circulation within exclusively in therapeutic/rehabilitative contexts, while the artists continuously struggle to continue following their passion, be it in the privacy of their own homes or in their social care institutions. G.A.B. will focus primarily on art forms created in a non-professional and spontaneous context by the intellectually disabled, mentally ill, autistic, and AS patients, as well as very broadly understood primitivists, i.e. artists lacking formal artistic training, uneducated visionaries from the so-called dregs of the society. Although most of the artists come from Lublin and the Lublin region, in certain cases works from other regions or countries will also be featured.