Who is Willem van Genk?

Willem van Genk (April 2, 1927 – May 12, 2005) was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, celebrated as one of the leading masters of Outsider Art. Throughout his vigor he suffered from sharp mental distress, experiencing symptoms united to autism and schizophrenia. On account of his passion for trains, buses, and train stations, he called himself the “King of Stations”.

Van Genk’s panoramic cityscapes and fragmented collages vent his feelings about futuristic authority, feelings which were shaped by an abusive father who, in adjunct to administering his own beatings, left him exposed to a traumatic experience at the hands of the Gestapo during the German bustle of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

Van Genk’s art has been widely exhibited in Europe, where it is then in many museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Lille Metropole Musee d’Art Modern, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut (LaM), the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art in Zagreb, and the Museum of Everything in London.Raw Vision, the leading magazine covering Art Brut, ranks van Genk accompanied by the “masters of outsider art”. At the start of 2005, the year of the artist’s death, van Genk’s Keleti Station, now in the gathering of the Museum of Everything in London, sold for a hundred thousand dollars at New York’s Outsider Art Fair, thus environment the folder for most costly work ever sold by a energetic outsider artist. On that occasion, Roberta Smith, the chief art critic of The New York Times, praised the piece “as the leading candidate for best in show”. At least one extra critic has identified van Genk as the most important Dutch outsider artist.

Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, the first solo exhibition of the performer in the United States, was presented from September 10 through November 30, 2014, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.