“Crossroads,” the new joint project by ABCD and the Museum Montanelli, presents works by three contemporary international art brut artists who share a common theme: the city as a place that defines our lives.
German artist Stefan Häfner creates three-dimensional residential modules with a carefully thought-out interior design that are his vision of the “city of the future.” The paintings of Belgian artist Marcel Schmitz explore the anonymous metropolis as an extraordinary, multilayered structure. Several meters in length, the drawings of recently discovered Czech artist Ota Prouza are an infinite tangle of roads and railway tracks surrounded by skyscrapers seen from a bird’s-eye view. In all three artists’ work, urban space is a mental space as well. Their attempts at finding their bearings within it or controlling it through the artistic act is in actuality an attempt at making themselves at home in their own mental territory.
