“Super-Rough,” a sculpture exhibition presented by Outside Art Fair and guest curated by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in Soho

The Outsider Art Fair is excited to present Super-Rough, a large-scale group exhibition of close to two hundred sculptural works by approximately 60 self-taught, visionary and vernacular folk artists from around the world. Overseen by Takashi Murakami, in collaboration with several dozen Outsider Art Fair dealers and gallerists, the show takes place in a raw, expansive ground floor space in SoHo, New York City.

Super-Rough, a word play on Superflat–Murakami’s highly influential term for a new genre of Japanese Pop Art that emerged at the turn of the millennium, proposes the private and idiosyncratic universe of Outsider Art as an alternative to the ongoing spectacle of contemporary art and popular culture. Also referencing Outsider Art’s DIY dimensionality and handmade aesthetic, Super-Rough offers a diametrical departure from the slick seductive surfaces of a shiny consumer consciousness. At the same time it reflects Murakami’s understanding that in visual culture there is equivalence to all manners of art, a super-flattening of prior hierarchical distinctions between fine art and popular or vernacular arts, between what is professional and institutionally ratified and what is self-taught. On the compositional and textural implications of an adjective like “rough” Murakami cites the calligraphic Zen paintings of temple monks and Buddhist sculpture, in which studied refinement gradually drifts towards a rougher abstraction, and how in each there is a forceful connection between refinement and roughness. He also sees a connection between religious art and the spiritual strain in Outsider Art, explaining that “Outsider Artists don’t think about unnecessary things, they focus in on that state.”

Certain tendencies emerge out of the imaginative unpredictability of these tactile inventions, where assemblage reveals its true cumulative glory—be it a refuse-laden metal bus by the late Dutch master Willem Van Genk (1927-2005), the bead and sequin-encrusted foam works by Monica Valentine;
JP Ritsch-Fisch