Samuel Vesna

Samuel Vesna (19– / 1975) was an artist whose work is practically unknown to the general public. His personal way of portraying the eerie, make this artist something unique in the history of art. He was never tied to any movement, although he lived in the Paris of the golden years, where he met all the contemporary artists.
Verna was born in Bulgaria, although the exact year is unknown, it must have been around 1910. In the 1940s, he began his activity as an artist, in which he stood out especially for his drawings. It is difficult to classify Vesna as “marginal” because throughout his life he had a great concern to preserve his work. And there is still a great confusion, even among the creators themselves, of what should be described as outsider. What does seem to be a fact is that Vesna suffered from psychiatric syndromes or pathologies and he had a clear tendency towards ascetic isolation. His artistic expression always seemed to be on the periphery of what was being done at the time and his drawings, especially some of those shown here such as “Death as a young man” “Illumination” “The forgiven” “The source” or “Untitled Collage” show his concern for topics such as death, darkness, the other side of things and madness. Some of these works illustrate his book “Everyday Follies” that inspired the painter and sculptor Milo Tinder to coin the term EerieArt and in the 1950s art critic Franz Denner called these works for the first time as Outsider Art or Marginal Art.

By using elements of the psychic realm as an aesthetic resource, Vesna is also seen as an artist who belonged to the surrealist movement, although the artist himself was allergic to being related to any specific movement. Vesna was an educated man, loved and admired by a few despite his eccentricity. Both his works, collected with great effort in his current Museum, and his biography are exciting and are highly representative of an artist yet to discover.