Judy A Saslow gallery presents a new exhibition that showcases four brilliant and talented outsider artists each with their own unique style.

Clyde Angel
Clyde Angel worked in a solitary manner in a welder’s shop in Comanche, Iowa. He was fearful of meeting people, preferring instead for people to see him through his art. He created beautifully intricate pieces of figurative metal sculptures. His work typically featured animal and human forms with certain elements of nature like stars or flowers. His works have an appeal and energy to which everyone can relate.

Carlo Zinelli
Carlo was born in 1916 in the province of Verona. He was put to work on a farm at the age of nine and began to show signs of schizophrenia during the period of his military service. These symptoms increased until he was finally committed to the hospital at Verona. He began to draw and paint in 1957 when he was thirty-nine years old and continued to do so until his death. In his early work, rows and rows of silhouetted figures echo the exercise yard and crowded dormitories that he experienced. Zinelli’s later work introduced words and letters, repeating them in the same way as he had the human forms.

Christine Sefolosha
Christine Sefolosha was born in 1955 into a German-Swiss family, which had settled in French-speaking Montreaux. She began drawing as a child, often during bouts of chronic insomnia. In 1975, she moved to South Africa, where she settled in Johannesburg. Here she took up painting and drawing. By 1986, she was living alone with her three children in her childhood home. She began to paint and draw anew, inspired by her years in Africa.
When Sefolosha works, she crouches on the ground, stretching across large sheets of thick paper to apply somber pigments with her hands, using vigorous, splashing gestures. She learned to mix her paints with dirt and tar, creating a synthesis of sophistication and crudity, which is reminiscent of the work of the Paleolithic cave painters of Lascaux or Altamira. Her typical figures are wild animals—wolves and birds of prey.

Michael Smith
Michael Smith’s drawings of men and women in unusual clothes call to mind the 1940’s fashion design industry, as well as illustration styles of the period. But with a truly unique and consistent approach to composition and visual style, Smith adds an indescribable element of mystery to his subjects. His figures are carefully shaded and realistically modeled, but they retain an eerily doll-like quality.