GALLERY ANNOUNCEMENT-2026 OUTSIDER ART FAIR
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to announce the theme for its 2026 stand at the New York Outsider Art Fair. We are calling our presentation PROTO-SURREALISM. Our focus in the gallery this last year has been the relationship between Surrealism, in particular the role of Andre Breton and his relationship with the artist and collector Jean Dubuffet.
We are basing our booth on what we are calling Proto-surrealism. The Surrealists were drawn to Dubuffet and his collection because they saw many of the qualities and intentions they were trying to incorporate into their own work by intellectual and deliberate means. These directions were the occult, dreams, madness, spiritualism including mediumship, visionary world building, automatic writing, children’s art, art perceived as ethnographic.
The Surrealists were drawn to Art Brut, much as were the artists of the Primitivist movement borrowing from and exploring ancient and tribal cultures. For a time Breton added a few of his own discoveries and brought his interests in others to the Collection; artists still very much known to us today such as Hector Hyppolite, Victorian Sardou, Helene Smith, Augustine Lesage Victor Hugo etc. His framework of acceptance was wider than that of Dubuffet and he wasn’t the only Surrealist and artist taken by the interests in these undefined artists. Max Ernst, for example, passed on the seminal book by Hans Prinzhorn, “Artistry of the Mentally Ill” to Jean Arp, Dubuffet, Paul Eluard and Andre Breton.
Art History has had no problem accepting the Art Brut influences and inspirations of the Surrealists. But as with the cultural artists who created the “tribal” works that influenced the earlier and later primitivist modernists, it was the Western mainstream art world that received the attention and art world legitimacy rather than the artists included under the Art Brut umbrella and beyond. This has not changed much to this day and this sad anomaly became the underlying motivation for our Proto-Surrealism concentration.
The Non-mainstream artists of Art Brut and beyond were and are making their work independently of the infrastructure of the Contemporary canon. They were never a movement. They had no manifestos other than the raw powers of their very individual voices. The Surrealists were intellectually motivated to tap into this power. The Proto-Surreal artists (This is a description , not a definition) were already focusing on their own creations, following no dialog with mainstream art history in their processes.. For the most part they created for themselves, for the spirits, or for the Moral, physical and spiritual balance of their cultural communities. The work is outside time. Their art was used as source material for a Western influenced art movement, and, except for Dubuffet and a few likeminded others, they were excluded from the world arena through neglect and the ever present hegemonies of art world gentrification of non-Western cultures.
The creation of this art has never stopped. It is still the real Surreal . It is still copied and exploited and excluded from the academic roundtables of world art. Its truths remain ancient and universal and simultaneously Contemporary.
We are not trying to recreate Dubuffet’s vision in this booth and in the exhibitions we feature at the gallery. Instead we are offering a very small curated cross-section of a huge part of living Art. These are the artists do naturally what the Surrealists so gloriously sought to do in their own explorations.
The artists we will show are Angkasapura , Alireza
Asbahi (CC), Ilija "Bosilj" Bašičević , JJ Cromer,Caroline Demangel, Solange Knopf, Davood Koochaki, Tomo Kōya, M’onma, Jean-pierre Nadau, Izabella Ortiz, Sandra Sheehy, Imam Sucahyo, Gregory an Maanen, Steve Wilson, Joseph Yoakum and Anna Zemankova.
These artists are working in the same ways they and the generations before them always have. They were the Surrealists before the Surrealists. They are oneiric Warriors.
Metropolitan Pavilion,
125 W 18th St., New York, NY 10011
Avant
-première VIP et presse :
jeudi 19 mars 2026, de 12h à 18h
Vernissage :
jeudi 19 mars 2026, de 18h à 21h
Ouverture au public :
vendredi 20 mars 2026, de 11h à 20h
Samedi 21 mars 2026, de 11h à 20h
Dimanche 22 mars 2026, de 11h à 18h
Solange Knopf
"The Inner Darkness" No. 7,2025
Colored pencil on black paper
51 x 51 inches
129.5 x 129.5 cm
SoK 123
