A journey into art, madness and the unconscious. An exploration of visionary artists and the creative impulse, from the Flemish Masters of the Renaissance to the avant-garde movement of Surrealism and the unsung geniuses of Art Brut and Outsider Art.

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There is a thornily fascinating relationship between art and madness; “mad” people have often experienced an unstoppable urge to create art. Art & Mind explores the interrelated creative impulses of compulsion, vision, spiritual and conceptual fixations, and the inspiration found in the deepest recesses of the human mind.

Many artists have experienced bouts of madness. Van Gogh cut his own ear while confined in a psychiatric hospital, William Blake had conversations with dead poets, Goya was hearing voices, and Munch was convinced of being condemned into madness since birth. The Surrealists Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn and Antonin Artaud also spent time confined in asylums, and captured their experiences of madness through art.

With guidance from psychologists, art historians, and curators from across the globe, Art & Mind traces the advances in the understanding of the human mind and that understanding’s influence on art. Romantic, Surrealist, and outsider artists have each been inspired by the gradual emergence of an empirically-informed awareness of the unconscious, notably the work of Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, to explore the hidden realms of dreams and visions in their art.

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Artists featured include but are not limited to: