Later this week in New York, the Independent 20th Century art fair opens and Sonia Dutton of Dutton Gallery is bringing unearthed artworks from self-taught artists that have never been exhibited.
Presenting the works of Rose deSmith Greenman (1898-1983) and Australian Selby Warren (1887–1979), both self-taught, visionary artists who had to make work for themselves. Both artists began making work in their 70s and encapsulate a full expression of an innate and exalted drive to make and record memory.
Rose deSmith Greenman
Orphaned at a young age, Greenman was severely hearing impaired and lived her life in Boston and Newton, MA. Greenman married a pharmacist and had one daughter, Betty, and was a home-maker until her husband died suddenly in 1956. To make ends meet, she became a clerk at the Mass. Division of Banking and Insurance until her retirement in 1970. At that time, seemingly out of nowhere, Greenman began drawing at age 72. Over a period of the next seven years, Greenman drew obsessively, making work with increasing intensity as a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease began and progressed. Learn more.
Selby Warren
Warren was a bushman and larrikin who left home young to be a sheep shearer, stockman, bullocky, miner, fencer, rabbit trapper, and gold panner in the Abercrombie River before leading a life of manual labor. Taking up painting when he retired in 1963 at 74 years old to record his lived experiences, Warren explained that he had wanted to paint all of his life. Using materials with ingenuity and anything he could lay his hands on — he added mud, sand, grass clippings, and mica for effect — using brushes he made with his and his wife’s hair, and repurposed furniture and building materials that he cut into constructions for frames. Learn more.
Dutton Gallery will be at Independent 20th Century from September 5th – 8th.
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