Alma: Mediums and Visionaries
Es Baluard Museum, Palma de Mallorca, Spain | February 15, 2019 – June 2, 2019
The Es Baluard Museum of Palma de Mallorca presents an unprecedented exhibition of women artists who have moved between mysticism, mediumship, visionary experiences and spiritual philosophy. The curator Pilar Bonet attaches particular importance to new feminist positions arising from the works of these artists.
The exhibition is limited to works by European women artists born in the decades before the end of the World War I. It aims to make visible the diverse and extraordinary creativity of women who, on the basis of their biographies of trauma and emotional stress, created drawings, embroideries and texts that enabled them to escape reality and discover spiritual dimensions of existence. It is a story of searching for psychic roots and thus finding one's individual and appropriate way of expression. In many cases, it was not the aim of the authors to create works of artistic quality, but only to find the means of expression on an urgency from the depth of the psyche, and it was precisely in this way that works of breathtaking unfamiliar beauty and intensity were created, of an art beyond well-trodden paths and conventional aesthetic standards.
Through transpersonal experiences and contact with spiritual beings, the artists were able to draw creative energies from the depths and develop idiosyncratic cosmologies and world views. In their art outside the norms, they created spaces of personal mythologies, universes of private symbolic languages, which they often understood as a mission in the service of mankind.
The Collection of Mediumistic Art will be represented at the exhibition with a series of loans of works by Clara Schuff, Cecilie Marková, Margarethe Held, Käthe Fischer, Nina Karasek and Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz. It will be the first time that a drawing by the German medium Käthe Fischer will be shown in an exhibition. Nina Karasek's unique and exceptionally wide-ranging mediumistic oeuvre will be represented with six important works.
