The «Outsider Art: Creating the Universe» project is designed to indicate important features of Soviet and Russian outsider artists and set the criteria for evaluation of their art.

The habit pushes researchers and the public to seek in outsider art neither for novelty and wild artistic freedom, as did Jean Dubuffet, nor for the absence of any aesthetic, ethic, political or social biases in such works of art, as did Roger Cardinal. Instead, the public rather seeks to find some dark sides of an altered (by disease or social conditions) state of mind, while a researcher strives to find a transformation of a "grand narrative", an art therapeutic effect or God knows what in the works of marginalized artists.

However, the most important thing about outsider artists' works is the worlds that they create, their inclination towards paradoxes, absurdity, integrity, and self-sufficiency which is akin to a child's play directed inwards. Their marginal social condition forces them to create worlds of their own, which have distinct traces of the author's consciousness. If it is a poorly socialized artist, a half hermit who manages to balance on the edge of the society only thanks to his silent mimicry and an ability to stay insignificant, then it is Henry Darger. If it is a violent rebel with an uncontrolled attraction and anger who could hardly handle his consciousness, power, and imagination, then it is Adolf Wölfli who was diagnosed as "insane" and imprisoned in a hospital at the end of the 19th century. If it is an unfortunate and stubborn person with global designs, unbelievable impracticality, almost a magical ability to survive and be content with little, not understanding why the world is not arranged according to his fantasies, then it is Pavel Leonov. It is easy to see that reasons for the marginalization of artists could be different. Their fate, character, temperament, and degree of socialization are different, and it is reflected in their paintings or graphic works. This genuine creative urge results in a potentially endless series of paintings characterized by cross-cutting issue a uniform color, a density of images, use of ornamentation and other ways of "cementing" their creation and their universes. Outsider art is about building and structuring the existence, an interaction with one's collapse. In this process, every single artistic act is only a small brick in the author's bizarre world-building. That's why I think it is important to note that it is wrongfully and unproductive to discuss a separate masterpiece of an outsider artist. It makes sense only to consider the complete oeuvre of an author in its integrity, realizing that personal aesthetic preferences are difficult to avoid.

Marginalized artists are not constrained by public expectations or conventions of art because they are neither trying to conform nor to confront and transform them. They create spontaneously and on their own, using the materials, images, and samples available to them only for one purpose which is the process of creation itself. As soon as this "safe zone" of the involuntary artistic freedom is destroyed by artists' socialization, remission, recovery or awareness of his or her recognition, an option to seek for benefits (not necessarily material ones) appears. It results in artists creating a product that meets the expectations of the public, collectors or specialists, instead of building their own universes. I dare to say that this unstable condition isolates outsider art, letting it serve as an example of the very nature of creativity, and makes it a unique phenomenon that belongs not only and not so much to the field of art, although it is actively and successfully involved in art and is exploited by it.

In the exhibition and the catalog, we attempted to pick some outsider artists whose works are integral and worthy of the attention of both specialists and the public. This list does not claim to be complete, but it could be considered a basis for a reevaluation of state of Russian outsider art and formation of the ground for research of the phenomenon from aesthetic, psychological, social, existential, philosophical and other perspectives. Besides, we hope for a growing interest in outsider art among a wide audience, not alien to the perception of the unusual art.

Outsider art as a «nature reserve» can be represented in the form of an abandoned garden. It is a once-well-groomed space overgrown with a variety of inconspicuous and ordinary flowers that associate with amateurish works of self-taught artists. They huddle in the shadows of well-groomed ornamental flowers, fruit trees, and bushes the beauty of which reminds of the perfection of works of professionals. Naïve art resembles the modest charm of wildflowers, while art brut is more like weeds with stems of psychopathological and parapsychological expression colored by an experience of spiritualistic, visionary or "сontactee" revelations. Works of outsider artists are a kind of exotic flora of some hybrid origin. In "greenhouses" of art schools and museums, independent wild plants are not welcomed and usually removed. Nowadays, art brut serves as some root system or nutritious humus for outsider art to grow. Outsider artists independently learn the basics of cultivating their subculture. Outsider art invades and crosses artistic practices unpredictably, and its authors harvest a large crop.

Under the influence of sociocultural, technogenic, and psychopharmacological evolution, art brut disappeared over time. Only memories of relics of the past, such as A. Lobanov, M. Kalyakin, and F. Smirnov, as well as an occasional experience of the contemporaries like A. Hatkevich and A. Sakhnov, remained. In the USSR, the artifacts related to art brut were more often referred to as "creativity of the mentally ill" that captured only the attention of professionals in the field of psychodiagnostics or art therapy. At the end of the 20th century, associates and «breeders» of the «other» art appear, such as V. Abakumov, A. Yarkin, V. Gavrilov, I. Rekhovsky, K. Bogemskaya and other respected researchers, including A. Migunov, O. Dyakonitsyna, V. Grozin, and I. Vovk. Over time, the term "outsider art" was also adopted by clinicians who do not clearly distinguish this phenomenon from the art-therapeutic expression. The field develops slowly, carefully, sometimes randomly, based on the professional preferences and knowledge of a small number of connoisseurs or researchers, collectors, doctors, and art dealers. A lot has been done to establish outsider art in Russia: many exhibitions, scientific conferences, expeditions, educational activities were held, studies and monographs were published. Alexander Lobanov is unconditionally one of the famous outsider artists in Europe.

Outsider art is traditionally seen through the prism of disability with an emphasis on external circumstances, such as psychiatric experience, autism, social isolation, needlessness. Let's leave aside the authors' background and biography and move into the immense and amazing universe of self-taught artists' hidden worlds mythology, their serially repeated works executed in the monologue manner which is probably based on illogicality, absurdity, and non-pragmatism. The uniqueness of these works is determined by the interweaving of naïve artistry, the absence of cultural impact, and psychopathology.

Gathering a group of iconic outsider artists from the USSR and Russia proved to be a difficult task. In 2016, an attempt was made to determine the status of outsider art (V. Gavrilov, N. Musyankova, A. Suvorova), however, it was not possible to compile a list of the key artists. This time, the curators of the exhibition invited 16 experts to take a survey. Among them were art historians, collectors, and just self-taught art lovers. It was necessary not to form a rating but to summarize subjective opinions. As a result, more than 30 unique outsider artists were listed. This allowed us to pick authors whose works are presented in the exhibition.

Most respondents naturally chose Pavel Leonov, Alexander Lobanov, Vasily Romanenkov, and Alex Hatkevich. Some of them mentioned mid-twentieth century authors with psychiatric experiences, such as Mikhail Kalyakin and Fedor Smirnov. More than a half of the interviewers noted Andrei Tsymbal, Alexander Savchenko, Alexei Sakhnov, Yuri Zeleny, Valery Isayans, Ekaterina Skvortsova (Katyusha) and several other artists.

We emphasize that we do not seek to present these artists as the best. Maybe they are just the most famous ones. But this depends not so much on their skills, but on the activity of collectors, managers, dealers, friends. We apologize in advance if some artist didn't end up in the exhibition. We simply don't know some authors and couldn't reach the others. But we managed to gather together information about interesting domestic outsider artists.

The studies of the art of the mentally ill in USSR were conducted between the 1920s and 1970s by several researchers (P.I. Karpov, E.A. Vachanadze, S.A. Boldyreva and others). Didactic collections of drawings of the mentally ill which were kept at the departments of psychiatry of medical universities and in some hospitals were used to teach to diagnose mental disorders began to be seen as manifestations of creativity around the mid-1980s. This led to a rethinking of boundaries of art and introduced psychiatrists and collectors to avant-garde and modernist art as well as foreign studies in the field.

The ideology of the late Brezhnev's Stagnation was oriented towards creating a positive image of Soviet psychiatry since its reputation was damaged due to its misuse in the sake of political goals. By the end of the 1970s, the USSR Ministry of Health developed a project coordinated with the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, the USSR State Committee for Publishing, Printing and Book Trade, and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It included an outline of publications, some of which were aimed at Western readers. In the first half of the 1980s, an illustrated three-volume edition dedicated to the art of the mentally ill - "The pictorial language…" was published. The authors were reputable soviet psychiatrists (Babayan E.A., Morozov G.V., Morkovkin V.M., Smulevich A.B.) and art critics whose names were mentioned only in the second volume. The very fact of the appearance of a politically initiated publication indirectly indicated the emerging interest in the phenomenon of the creativity of the mentally ill.

At the turn of the 1980-1990s, the image of creativity of the mentally ill and outsider art in Russian culture began to change rapidly. Transformations were caused by "glasnost" and "perestroika" politics which affected psychiatry and art and freed them from the pressure of ideology. They became connected by the concept of "otherness" which has become an important category of the culture of this era. Another important factor stimulating the emergence of outsider art was the growth of private initiatives.

In 1990, the Center for the creative rehabilitation of the mentally ill was organized «Nerve». Most of the like-minded organizers were people of artistic professions. In the same year, several exhibitions were held. The first one called «We Also Creative" was held in N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute of Emergency Medicine. Representatives of the scientific community and the world of art started to change their approach to creativity of the mentally ill, the first publications on this topic appeared.

A characteristic feature of the 1990s was international cooperation. In 1990, an exhibition of the art of the mentally ill from the USSR was held in Munich. The organizer of the exhibition was the Center for Creative Rehabilitation «Nerve». In 1997, under the Documenta Х program in Kassel, the "Jaroslawler Kollektion" exhibition from the INIE collection was held. These projects demonstrated the interest in Russian outsider art.

In 1995, the Humanitarian Center of the Russian Cultural Foundation which contained an outsider art collection was renamed the Public Association Humanitarian Center - Museum of Outsider Creativity / Outsider Art. By 1996 the creation of the Museum of Outsider Creativity / Outsider Art.

was completed. The museum exposition was located on Izmailovsky prospect in Moscow and included three small halls and presented the following sections of the collection: 1) outsider art; 2) neuve invention; 3) naive art 4) art of the mentally ill. Also, the museum took part in one of the most iconic outsider and naïve art events in Europe – Insita'97 triennial of naive art in Bratislava.

In the mid-1990s, the discourse of outsider art in Russia became more scientifically oriented. As in Europe, philosophers got involved in defining its boundaries, interpreting and studying the phenomenon. In 1995, the first conference on primitive and marginal art was conducted with the participation of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State University's Department of Aesthetics under the guidance of Professor A.S. Migunov. In 1997, at the initiative of V.V. Gavrilov, a series of domestic and foreign exhibitions of the INIE collection began. Also, interdisciplinary conferences on spiritual, artistic and art-therapeutic approaches to art-making were conducted and from 1999 to 2003, four symposia INIE – SIPE (International Society for Psychopathology of Expression) were organized.

Between 2000-2010, the Museum of Naive Art (сurrently, the Museum of Russian Lubok and Naive Art) was conducting research, preservation, and popularization of outsider art in Russia. The museum regularly holds the «Festnaive» triennial which also features a section on outsider art.

Collectors and private institutions focused on the preservation and promotion of the phenomenon and discovering new artists were and still are of great importance for the development of outsider art in Russia. A.V. Turchin (collection of Turchin-Bogemskaya), V.V. Gavrilov (collection INIE), A.V. Migunova-Tikhanyuk, ArtNaive Gallery (Moscow), the public organization Outsiderville (St. Petersburg) and others are among them.

In addition to the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State University's Department of Aesthetics, the State Institute of Art Studies (Moscow) became another important academic center for studying outsider art. Research and popularization of this phenomenon were begun by K.G. Bogemskaya and continued by N.A. Musyankova who curated scientific events on outsider art in the 2010s.

Outsider art remained a "zone of silence" throughout almost the entire Soviet period of domestic art studies. However, the turn of the 1980s and 1990s was marked by a significant actualization of outsider art and creativity of the mentally ill. This occurred due to a rethinking of the language of art, the phenomenon of creativity and its basic patterns as well as to the end of ideological pressure on art and the spread of the "otherness" concept. As a result, the institutionalization of outsider art in Russia led to the emergence of public initiatives, exhibitions, and publications in the field.

An important role in shaping the discourse of outsider art was played by collectors who appeal to authoritative foreign researchers, representatives of specialized art and psychiatric institutions, as well as to publications on the topic. Also, private museums and collections conducting educational and social activities were formed. At the beginning of the 2000s, a steady interest in outsider art among academic researchers grew. Nevertheless, outsider art studies in Russia are still only at their very beginning.