Art Brut and Outsider Art have long influenced the classic modern art movements of its time: artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Breton, and Jean Dubuffet identified themselves radically with the creative processes and the imagery of the cultural outsider who opened a whole new view of the world. Contemporary artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, the Chapman brothers and Mike Kelley show in their works and their work processes, that they can hardly resist the spell. On occasion of the gallery‘s 25th Anniversary, the artist Michael Bauer ventures into the gallery archive and selects a personal and representative choice of historical and contemporary works. A tribute to the tradition of the “artists’s art” and a glimpse of the treasures of the gallery program.
 
Michael Bauer, * 1973 in Erkelenz, lives and works in New York.
Since its founding year in 1988, Galerie Susanne Zander has come to establish itself internationally as one of the leading galleries for Outsider Art and Art Brut, dedicating its program from the onset exclusively to outstanding marginal artistic positions both historical as well as contemporary. In recent years, the gallery owners Nicole Delmes and Susanne Zander have become increasingly interested in the what can be termed as “Conceptual Outsider Art,” raising new questions about common practices of curation and notions of reception, production and historical contextualization of singular artistic positions that are labeled as “Outsider Art” and which at the same time resort to common strategies of contemporary art.
Susanne Zander has co-curated a series of pioneering exhibitions for museums and art societies amongst which “Obsession” (with Morton Bartlett, Henry Darger, 2000, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, DE) and “The Message - The Medium as an Artist” (2008, Museum Bochum, DE) and has played a significant advisory role in the exhibition series “Secret Universe” (2011 - 2013, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE). The gallery releases publications on a regular basis such as Horst Ademeit – Living in The Radiant Cold (2010), The Message - Art and Occultism (2008), Foma Jaremtschuk (2008), Obsession (2000) or more recently Margret: Chronik einer Affäre (2012).
Over the last 25 years the gallery has brought the art of the Outsider to the attention of collectors and curators, positioning formerly unknown artists such as Miroslav Tichy and Henry Darger onto the art market as early as the 1990's. The discovery of Horst Ademeit in 2008 brought the gallery into the focus of contemporary Outsider Art unleashing once again the debate on common notions of “inside” and “outside” art.