Roger Cardinal (1940-2019): Castles are Elsewhere Memorial Exhibition – a lifetime of wandering, conversations, observations and friendship.
November 2022
Castles are Elsewhere is an exhibition that commemorates the life of Roger Cardinal (1940-2019), whose fascination with the extraordinary led him on a wondrous odyssey upon which he encountered creativity in the most unexpected places. Roger is probably best known for his seminal book titled Outsider Art, published in 1972 – the first of its kind in the UK which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. It was followed a few years later in 1979, with the ground-breaking Outsiders exhibition at The Hayward Gallery.
Through the treasures in his private art collection, his books, his letters with people within the field like Jean Dubuffet, and a selection of his fascinating diaries that he wrote daily, this exhibition will give an insight into Roger’s life, and we hope a fitting memoriam to a man who encouraged us all to look at art and life differently, to see that ‘castles are elsewhere’.
The exhibition includes works by Madge Gill, Michel Nedjar, Euguene Von Bruenchenhein, Janko Domsic, Valerie Potter and Ted Gordon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication where luminaires of the Outsider Art world have been invited to contribute with their recollections of Roger, along with an interview, texts and photos.
“Who are the Outsiders? They possess no qualifications as artists. They seem to work on their own, for themselves, for the fun of it. They know nothing of the trends and snobberies of the cultural centre. All prefer the rule of the imagination to the strictures of officialdom. Instinctive and independent, the appear to tackle the business of making art as if it had never existed before they came along. What they make has a primal freshness: it is the product of an authentic impulse to create and is free of conscious artifice.” – Roger Cardinal, 1979
The catalogue compiled by Jennifer Lauren and Vivienne Roberts that accompanied the exhibition has sold out – for a pdf version click here
