Works from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection travel to Hull
This residency has taken form using the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, housed at the Whitworth in Manchester, as a starting point. Holly Grange, the Curator of this collection, has provided this overview,
“The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is home to the largest public collection of Outsider Art in the UK. The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection (MKOAC), gifted in 2010, consists of over 1,200 individual artworks by over 120 Outsider artists. The MKOAC was collected by curator Monika Kinley and gallerist and curator Victor Musgrave over a period of 30 years (1979-2010). Feeling that most contemporary art was ‘bland and supine in the well-crafted chains of its own making’, they chose instead to seek out and collect artworks that they felt were genuinely original and intuitive: art that ‘tapped into the mains electricity of the imagination’. These were works by so-called ‘Outsider artists’, strikingly original artworks were produced by individuals belonging to no movement or school, who are self-taught and marginalised from the ‘mainstream’ art world.”
Alongside the six residency artists works are seven works from the Whitworth’s collection that the artists have chosen to appear alongside their work. They have purposely chosen not to have the artists biographies alongside the works, as they feel this taints the audiences ideas of the work. This has come from discussions the artists have had around how they, and the artists in this collection, are labelled and how society labels them based on their biographies and stories.
Get along to Artlink Hull before 21 June to see this work in person.
Images in slideshow are courtesy of the Whitworth, the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Trust (gift 2010):
Aloise Corbaz, Palais Rumine, Oil pastel on paper
Sava Sekulic, Napoelon and his Daughters, Household paint, graphite and ink
Judith Scott, Untitled, Yarn and wool wrapped around an object
