Visionary art
Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness - spiritual, mystical or drawn from such experiences. It names less a movement than a recurring current, with antecedents in Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, Gustave Moreau and Hilma af Klint. Its modern form owes much to the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, founded in 1946, whose artists - Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer and their fellows - fused Old Master technique with esoteric and religious imagery; painters such as Mati Klarwein and Robert Venosa trained with Fuchs. Since the late 20th century the field has organized itself through societies, festivals and artist collectives, with the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore as its clearest institutional home. Symbolism, Surrealism and psychedelic art remain its closest precursors.
Defining characteristics
- Spiritual, mystical or inner-experience subject matter
- Highly finished, illusionistic technique applied to impossible, otherworldly scenes
- Dense visionary detail: radiant light, mandala-like symmetry, hybrid or cosmic figures
- Symbolic rather than literal space - temples, cosmos and anatomy as spiritual maps
- Strong decorative surface and saturated, glowing color
Key figures
- Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) — Early Netherlandish master of phantasmagoric paradise and hell, the tradition's earliest antecedent
- William Blake (1757-1827) — English poet-painter whose illuminated prophetic books are the tradition's founding vision
- Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) — Swedish mystic whose temple paintings anticipated abstraction
- Ernst Fuchs (1930-2015) — Vienna School co-founder whose technique and teaching seeded contemporary visionary art
- Alex Grey (1953-) — American painter of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and leading theorist of the contemporary scene
Example works
- The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun — William Blake (c. 1805)
- The Garden of Earthly Delights — Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1500)
Sources
- Visionary art - Wikipedia encyclopedia