Transcendants II at Cavin-Morris
Cavin-Morris is pleased to present TRANSCENDANTS II, an exhibition of visionary drawings and paintings. While we recognize fully that the word ‘visionary’ is not a monolith of meaning, for the purposes of this exhibition we are interested in the works that serve as vessels of real spiritual connection, whether achieved through personal or community belief, or communication with, or direct and immediate presentation of, a vision. The art is not so much a narrative of visionary experience as it is an actual utilization of the creation as an arena of paranormal experience. For this reason, our exhibition is not and cannot be encyclopedic. Though ignored by mainstream art history its actual global presence is huge. TRANSCENDANTS could entertain and sustain a thousand variations.
In the last decade we have seen well-deserved attention paid to the spiritual abstractionists and surrealists of the early to mid-twentieth century. Exhibitions, books, and articles have been written on new and current artists working within the same parameters. Shows have been staged in major museums with works by Leonora Carrington, Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Remedios Varo, Georgiana Houghton, and others. The other commonality between these artists is that they all came up through or were seriously influenced by the ‘Academy’.
In December 2023, Cavin-Morris presented the first of two exhibitions called Transcendants which dealt with artists who were true spiritualists and mediums but were ignored by the art world because they were not part of that canonic mainstream, a life choice by many of the practitioners. The living artists in this follow-up exhibition illustrate the point that some working now need recognition and should not be bypassed by art historians in the current critical stampede toward newer artists who too often appropriate the spiritualistic visual language of earlier artists.
There has been a pithy problem with the above mainstream focus because it excludes some of the most authentic visionary artists in the world. It ignores the visionary content of artists who made work as a direct animistic contact with the paranormal world, often mediumistically, and who did not make the work for any part of the art world canon, but rather for personal and/or community or cultural reasons.
This exhibition reflects the work of Anna Zemánková, Frances Smokowski, Dagmar Havlíčková, František Jaroslav Pecka, Nicole Frobusch, and Cara Macwilliam. Though all are empathically tuned to animistic aspects of Nature and occult forces, the visual and conceptual language of these artists are quite different from each other. There is no central codex of protocols common to all; a spiritual vision beyond the call is an individual journey.
These six artists are not classic Art Brut artists. Each is or was involved on some level with the artworld and the cultural aesthetics of their times. We have included Anna Zemánková in both exhibitions because she was our beacon and gateway early on in understanding the tremendous heights and depths of artists making this kind of work as a personal amulet. They can rise above personal and political adversity by creating. The process of making the art is as important or more important than the final work.
We are presenting this body of work as an observation of the deep history of artists whose creations dance with the spirit world. While the work itself is timeless the art in the exhibition ranges from the 1920s to the present. An online catalog combining both shows will be available later in the Fall.
Artists in the exhibition include: Nicole Frobusch, Dagmar Havlíčková, Cara Macwilliam, František Jaroslav Pecka, Frances Smokowski, and Anna Zemánková.
For further information please contact info@cavinmorris.com
