About the Exhibition

After Shinichi Sawada’s successful solo show at Venus over Manhattan in New York, his work was then profiled through Art Basel OVR: Pioneers. This online platform was dedicated to artists who have broken new aesthetic, conceptual, or socio-political ground. The presentation comprised a series of eight cereamic sculptures as a collaboration between Venus over Manhattan and Jennifer Lauren Gallery.

Thirty-eight year old Shinichi Sawada has kept the same schedule for nearly twenty years. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, he attends Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare facility in Japan’s Shiga prefecture, where he spends the morning working at the in-house bakery, making bread. He spends the afternoons working with clay. Sawada first attended this facility, one of many similar institutions in Japan designed to support people with intellectual disabilities, when he was eighteen years old, shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. In the two decades since, his ceramic beasts – sometimes ghoulish, always fantastical, and deeply redolent of ancient mythologies still coursing through Japanese culture – have attracted the attention of critics and connoisseurs worldwide, notably after a presentation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

The Art Newspaper’s Tess Thackara selected Sawada as one of five artists to seek out at Art Basel: Pioneers - Read HERE

About the Exhibition

Jennifer Lauren Gallery presented new works for the virtual edition of Intersect Chicago 2020 from 6-12 November 2020. The fair was the evolution of SOFA – Sculpture Objects Functional Art. It was the intersection of art, design and objects. SOFA includes daily highlights on Glass, Contemporary Art, Design, Ceramic and Craft, Outsider Art, Fiber and Public Art / Sculpture.

The Jennifer Lauren Gallery showcased: mystical sculptural creatures from Japanese self-taught artists Shinichi Sawada and Akio Kontani; personal clay beings from British artist Terence Wilde; fun and colourful hand-felted 'Makoot' dolls from Japanese artist Makoto Okawa; layered web-like textile structures from British artist Aradne; symbolic cross-stitch and complex monochrome works by British artist Valerie Potter; imaginative pencil drawings from American artist Margaret Mousseau who only started drawing in her sixties; and not forgetting a new artist Joyce Davies from the Shetland Isles, who has created some powerful mono-screenprints.

Writer Edward Gomez has written about his curatorial selections HERE

About the Exhibition

The Outsider Art Fair Paris went virtual in 2020 due to Covid-19. The Jennifer Lauren Gallery was sorry to be miss people in person in Paris this year, but was pleased to present a gathering of new works, some never seen before, from artists the Gallery supports. You can no longer view the link to the page since the fair is over, but below is a selection of works from the artists I shared at the fair. You will see: eighties colour pop wonders that have never seen the light of day from Valerie Potter, cosmic visions in colour and monochrome from Julia Sisi, Moroccan beings from Mohammed Mrabet, layered communicative works with colour and symbols from Robert Fischer, detailed carved toothpicks from Pradeep Kumar and iconic spiky creatures from Shinichi Sawada. Not forgetting Jesse James Nagel making his debut with a visionary wonder with a fantastic title!

About the Exhibition

The Outsider Art Fair presented Art Brut Global, a virtual exhibition of artworks sourced through their network of renowned galleries and dealers. A three-phase project, Phase I highlighted works by canonical artists in the field from the world’s leading experts in Outsider Art, the exhibitors. Phase II highlighted artists that have become known to the field in the last three years and Phase III highlighted accomplished outsider artists living around the world.

As a leading focal point of the Outsider Art world, OAF is uniquely positioned to organise an exhibition that assembles the best available works in our field, and rally the passionate community of aficionados, collectors, and fairgoers that have been following OAF since its inception twenty-eight years ago.

Outsider Art dealers have carved out an historically important and influential niche in the art world landscape, thriving on the strength of the powerful art they have unearthed in places where few others were looking. With the help of astute writers and visionary curators, artists who today are the cornerstones of the Outsider Art and Art Brut canon like Aloïse Corbaz, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martin Ramirez, Shinichi Sawada, Judith Scott, Bill Traylor and Adolf Wölfli, have transcended those categories and been recognised as some of the greatest artists of their times. Now, a new generation of dealers and scholars has risen to the fore, making discoveries and using digital technology to reveal and disseminate incredible accounts of self-taught creators and the universes they invent. 

About the Exhibition

Jennifer returned to the Outsider Art Fair in New York in January 2020. Firm favourites returned alongside new artists ...

• Shinichi Sawada

• Akio Kontani

• Makoto Okawa

• Roy Collinson

• Chris Neate

• Leonhard Fink

• Margaret Mousseau

• Norimitsu Kokubo

• Carlo Keshishian

There is a youtube clip of the fair that can be found here, and if you scroll to 35:45 you will see a short walk around my booth.

About the Exhibition

The Jennifer Lauren Gallery made its debut at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris in October 2019 alongside other galleries such as Cavin-Morris from New York, Creative Growth from California and Galerie Atelier Herenplaats from Amsterdam.

Jennifer took nine artists to the fair: Aradne, Hakunogawa, Akio Kontani, Chris Neate, Valerie Potter, C.J. Pyle, Nobuo Sasaki, Shinichi Sawada and Makoto Toya.

About the Exhibition

The Doors of Perception focused on the visionary nature of art commonly known as outsider art, art brut, or self-taught art. The exhibition at Frieze New York presented a large constellation of works made by exceptionally gifted artists from five continents, offering a panorama of art created on the margins of society. Whether psychiatric patients, self-taught visionaries, or mediums, each of the artists in the exhibition felt at some point in their life the need to create an artistic language of their own in order to reveal what they understood to be the true nature of things. Often disenfranchised because of their mental condition or social status and without any previous artistic training, many of the artists exhibited here dedicated their lives obsessively to the creation of complex visual representations, often after experiencing a life-changing epiphany. A meeting with a supernatural power—whether an encounter with the divine, spirits of the dead, or extra-terrestrial beings—might have triggered this impulse to create. These remarkable events produced strong centrifugal forces that drove the artists from chaos to order, opening for them “doors of perception” to a transcendental reality that, in many cases, helped them survive their otherwise unstable life.

As William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

Shinichi Sawada was selected to be part of the presentation, curated by contemporary artist Javier Téllez. He was in good company alongside artists including: Carlo Zinelli, Judith Scott, Madge Gill, Marcel Storr and Henry Darger.

About the Exhibition

The Jennifer Lauren Gallery made its debut at the Drawing Now Art Fair at Carreau du Temple and was delighted to introduce two self-taught artists – Kate Bradbury (b.1961) from the UK and Shinya Fujii (b.1969) from Northern Japan. The Gallery was featured in the Insight section - a new platform for discovery which allows visitors to discover new artists – French or international – who are less known and presented in a solo or duo show by emerging or more established galleries.

Bradbury has been creating works in London since 2003. She is a prolific creator of a diverse range of artworks. From detailed ink scribblings over a metre in length to sculptural twirling dervishes made from found objects, her style of work is ever changing. Intuitively working day and night, Bradbury creates her pieces losing all sense of time, getting lost in the details of her drawings or sculptures.

Fujii drew as a child and only returned to drawing when his father passed away in 2007. Whilst listening to music, Fujii creates his works on brown Kraft paper with fine line ink from a narrow-nib pen. The patterns he creates weave together to make robots, insects, plants and figures. He draws for a maximum of an hour a day, with each drawing often taking several months to complete.

About the Exhibition

2019 started with a bang with my second appearance at the New York Outsider Art Fair. There were new ceramic works by Shinichi Sawada and automatic black and white drawings by Chris Neate, alongside 1970s mosaicked sculptures by famed outsider artist Nek Chand. Three artists made their debut at the fair too: complex colourful drawings by Japanese artist Norimitsu Kokubo, delicate but dark embroideries by British artist Valerie Potter and overlaid text and block colour drawings by German artist Robert Fischer.

About the Exhibition

Jennifer Lauren Gallery made their debut at the Outsider Art Fair in New York in January 2018. The Gallery brought along five artists’ works including the Japanese artists Shinichi Sawada, Masao Obata, Makoto Takezawa and Shinya Fujii, as well as UK artist Chris Neate.

Below is a brief introduction to each artist but more detail can be found on their artist page, linked through their name.

Born in 1982, Shinichi Sawada started attending Shiga Prefecture (a local social welfare facility for persons with intellectual disabilities) three or four times a week from around the year 2000. At this time, he began creating his ceramic art works at a kiln-equipped pottery workshop in the local mountains. He has created around fifteen different motifs that change slightly each time he makes them.

Masao Obata (1943-2010) only started drawing in his residential care facility (Hyogo Prefecture) in Japan after the age of sixty. His strong urge to create led him to source pieces of large cardboard to draw on from the kitchens in his facility, as the paper was too small. Obata often drew in red as for him this was the colour of happiness.

Born in 1969, Shinya Fujii became interested in art whilst a high school student following reading a magazine article, after which he won a prize for his entry into a comic book design competition. Fujii returned to drawing in 2007 when his father died and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Makoto Takezawa (1970 - 2010) lived in Hokkaido, Japan in a facility for those with intellectual disabilities from 1988. With only a mild intellectual disability he managed to graduate from Junior High School, and it was here, through his art education classes, that he learnt about woodcut techniques.

Chris Neate (b.1954) has been developing his style of drawing since his late teens. During the 1970s he attended Art College in Leeds but never completed a foundation course nor did he feel he was given any formal training. During his time working as a hospital social worker with older people Neate sporadically drew, and this need to draw has intensified over the years. Neate practices automatic drawing and turns the piece as he draws.