Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel 1929 - 1996 ) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art.Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia

Nellie Mae Rowe - American Folk Art

"Nellie Mae Rowe was a self-taught African-American artist known for her unique drawings and sculptures of the rural South. Using everyday materials, including chewing gum, markers, egg cartons, and food trays, she melded personal mythology with Christian symbolism. “I feel great being an artist. I didn't even know that I would ever become one. It is just surprising to me,” she once said. Born Nellie Mae Williams on July 4, 1900 in Fayetteville, GA, the artist grew up on her father’s sharecropping farm where she showed an early propensity for drawing and crafts. Married to her first husband Ben Wheat in 1916, she worked mostly as farm hand over the next few decades. After the death of her second husband Henry Rowe in 1948, she began devoting much of her time to creating dolls and paintings. Around this time, Rowe began setting up works in her front yard, inviting visitors to come look as she played gospel tunes on an electric organ. She was first brought to the attention of a larger audience after her inclusion in the 1976 exhibition “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770­–1976.” Rowe died on October 18, 1982 in Vinnings, GA. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others."(artnet)

 

Thornton Dial

"Thornton Dial, (born Sept. 10, 1928, Emelle, Ala.—died Jan. 25, 2016, McCalla, Ala.), American artist who created powerfully evocative assemblages, sculptures, collages, paintings, and drawings that reflected his personal history and events in the world. Dial had little formal schooling and did farm work as a child. When he was about 12 years old, he was sent to live with a relative in Bessemer, Ala., and he engaged in a variety of work, including carpentry and house painting, as a teen. He later became a metal worker at the Pullman Standard railroad-car manufacturing plant. Throughout his adult life he created assemblages, which he called “things,” out of found and discarded objects, possibly inspired by similar pieces made and displayed in rural front yards in parts of the South. In 1987 another folk artist, Lonnie Holley, introduced Dial to the collector William Arnett, who was on a mission to find and preserve vernacular African American art. In 1990 an exhibition of Dial’s work, “Thornton Dial: Ladies of the United States,” was mounted by Kennesaw State College (now Kennesaw State University) in Marietta, Ga. Numerous solo and group exhibitions followed, notably the traveling art show “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” which started at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2011 and concluded at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2013. His notable works include the sculpture Lost Cows (2000–01), made from the bones of cattle, and Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together (2003), in which bits of fabric were assembled to take on the appearance of a flag. Collections of Dial’s works were housed in such museums as the American Folk Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C."(britannica.com)

 "In 2011, Dial's work was profiled in a four-page story in Time Magazine, where art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo argued that Dial's work belongs to the category of art and should not be pigeon-holed into narrowly defined categories:
"Dial's work has sometimes been described as "outsider art", a term that attempts to cover the product of everyone from naive painters like Grandma Moses to institutionalized lost souls like Martín Ramírez and full-bore obsessives like Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who spent a lifetime secretly producing a private fantasia of little girls in peril. But if there's one lesson to take away from "Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial," a triumphant new retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it's that Dial, 82, doesn't belong within even the broad confines of that category....What he does can be discussed as art, just art, no surplus notions of outsiderness required....And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around.

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times called Dial "preternaturally gifted," and said he looks "dumfoundingly adept to some of us because his energy and fluent line, abstracted in maelstroms of color, easily call to mind Pollock and de Kooning,"[10] while New York Times reporter Carol Kino described Dial's "work's look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew[ing] closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat."
In 1993, Dial's work was the subject of a large exhibition that was presented simultaneously at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. In 2000, the artist's work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2005-06, the Museum of Fine Art; Houston presented a major exhibition entitled "Thornton Dial in the 21st Century". Dial's works can be found in many notable public and private collections, including those of, among other institutions, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art."Wikipedia

Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel (18 October 1929, in Alkmaar, Netherlands – 4 December 1996, in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art

Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia

Yolande Fievre

Yolande Fievre (1907-83) is a french painter and sculptor, born in Paris the 25th of January 1907 and deceased in Paris in 1982.
Young traveler, Fièvre visited America and will live in Egypt during a few years. Student at Paris Fine-Arts Academy, later teacher at Orleans Fine-Arts Academy, she asserted herself very early as an autodidacte. Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Bernard Requichot, Jean Dubuffet, Raymond Queneau were her friends.
Fièvre began passionated researches and passionating experiments on material, often organic, giving a strange aspect to her reliefs. We could be in a fantastic and lunar world.
These reliefs are collages, or rather assemblies, where the objects are part of a mise-en-scene, some boxes-objects, or some kind of quite special reliquaries.