World Transformers: The Art of the Outsiders

by Daniel Baumann

The realm of outsider art provides for the untrained artist a haven from the art industry, populated as it is by those too bizarre to function within official culture. The fabulous universes depicted in Henry Darger's collaged watercolors represent but one of the more celebrated instances of outsider art's tendency to flout the conventions of reality. World The Art of the Outsiders presents a wide range of art by artists working beyond the bounds of conventional artistic production, ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, including the dream worlds of Swiss artist Aloïse, whose work was collected by Dubuffet; the precise mathematical utopias of George Widener; and the "Ewigkeitenendeland" (End-of-Eternities Land) of Austrian artist August Walla. Others represented here are A.C.M., Emery Blagdon, Darger, Auguste Forestier, Magde Gill, Karl Junker, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Judith Scott, Oskar Voll, Adolf Wölfli and Birgit Ziegert.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2011