Great Mystery Show at American Visionary Art Museum, MD
until September 2, 2018 "The Great Mystery Show" playfully explores mystery – that one secret power behind great art, science, and pursuit of the sacred – by weaving together the creative investigations of 39 visionary artists, research scientists, astronauts, mystics and philosophers. American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230
www.avam.org
type brut at galerie gugging
until September 17, 2018 "type brut" at Galerie Gugging explores humans and our senses, with works by Gugging artists alongside international self-taught artists. Artists include Karoline Rosskopf, Oswald Tschirtner, Johann Hauser, Julia Hanzl, August Walla and Josef Wittlich. galerie gugging
Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging Austria
www.gugging.com
until September 28, 2018 "THE F FACTOR: Femininity, frailty, force" at Maroncelli 12 presents the work of five female artists: Marie-Claire Guyot, Cristina Martella, Nabila, Franca Settembrini, Annamaria Tosini. Maroncelli 12
20154, Milan, Italy
www.maroncelli12.it
Musée Visionnaire, Zurich
until September 30, 2018 "Woman Outsider" presents the works of nine artists including Christiane Alanore, Sabrina Gruss, Josette Rispal and Judith Scott. Musée Visionnaire
Predigerplatz 10, 8001 Zurich, Switzerland
www.museevisionnaire.ch
Featuring: - Julia Sisi
- Metropolitan Museum
- Edmund Monsiel
- Kemel Leeford Rankine
- Jana Paleckova
- Josephine Tota
- Odinga Tyehimba
- Evelyne Postic
Raw Vision 98 Article Preview
SISI: The Lucid dreams and nomadic journeys of Julia Sisi
Author: Víctor M. Espinosa
Inner Animal, 2016, ink and acrylic on canvas, 19.7 x 27.5 ins. / 50 x 69.9 cm
Julia Sisi’s (b. 1957) fantastical drawings can resemble coloured illustration books or street art. Her visual vocabulary and repertoire rely on her intuitive development of aesthetic strategies used in illustration and graphic design, with a personal iconography. Graphic design elements and illustration techniques are present in the work of some of the most admired self-taught artists: Edward M. Gómez has, for example, defined Adolf Wölfli as a “visionary graphic designer” and a powerful “visual communicator”. (1) Aesthetic decisions and visual resources similar to Wölfli’s are also evident in Sisi’s work: rich patterning, vibrant colours, powerful lines, and tensions between improvisation and highly structured compositions. Images associated with water and fluidity are also
present in the work of both artists. Gómez has described a sense of flowing water in Wölfli’s work, (2) and some of the energy and inspiration in Sisi’s drawings comes from oceans and rivers, too.
Healing Egg, 2017, ink and acrylic on paper, 19.7 x 27.6 ins. / 50 x 70 cm
Sisi’s most recent drawings, her “Hypnagogia Visions and Visitations” series, were inspired by her lucid dreams, and by the river that runs alongside her property in the Indre region of central France, like some of Wölfli’s designs were inspired by “scenarios of dreams”. (3) Sisi’s use of black backgrounds came after a dream in which she was drawing with a red light, as if the lines were filaments. “If you close your eyes”, she said, “the background is black, so when you sleep the background is black.” (4) After that dream, she started to work on a black surface, reproducing the sensation of drawing with light, using Posca felt pens to create the fluid filaments of light. The symbolic elements in
her new series is also inspired by recent and long-past memories. Such highly symbolic content characterises her “Whispering Faces” (2015–16) and “Liquid Mirror” (2016) series.
Circle of Life, 2015, ink and acrylic on canvas, 31.4 x 31.4 ins. / 80 x 80 cm
Sisi works with acrylic paint for large areas and to paint thick lines, then uses markers to populate the flat areas with symbols, characters, cabalistic numbers and words that to her are magic. A motif of stairs recurs, connecting different levels in the “Whispering Faces” and “Liquid Mirror” series, and there are circular or spiral shapes that, like mandalas, are full of dualities, cardinal points, “arithmetereological” numbers, and characters that represent either metaphysically or symbolically an intimate personal microcosm. For Sisi, her faces are self-portraits as well as portraits of imaginary people. She insists that all of her drawings in the “Whispering Faces” and “Liquid Mirror” series narrate personal stories: “Those faces are talking to us, or more precisely,
are using visual languages to whisper to us about my life or the life stories of other people.” Understanding all of the semiotics of the symbols, signals and signs in her work would require knowing about her struggles with identity, her constant search for freedom, her experience as a migrant and the nomadic spirit that informs all her artwork. Read the rest of this article in Raw Vision 98, out now!
Notes
1. See Edward M. Gómez,“Visionary Graphic Designer”, in The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf – Giant – Creation, by D. Baumann and E. M. Gómez, Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 44.
2. Gómez, “Visionary Graphic Designer”, p. 45.
3. Gómez, “Visionary Graphic Designer”, p. 45.
4. Interview with Julia Sisi, October 1, 2017.
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