The art of a homeless person in an 11th-century palace in the heart of Barcelona

BarcelonaHousseinou Gassama was born in Senegal and lived on the streets around Santa Maria del Mar at least between 2008 and 2012. He painted houses and furniture—everything he didn't have—on small tables he made by recycling wine crates from Vila Vinateca, and neighbors would buy them to give to him. But one day Gassama disappeared: a friend from a nearby restaurant said he had gone to Almería to meet with an uncle. No one has heard anything more about him. His works are sold in galleries in Paris and New York, and he is represented in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, a result of the growing interest in outsider art. And now his work is back in the public eye alongside that of the Peruvian artist based in Paris, Alberto Quintanilla (Cusco, 1934), in an exhibition entitled Inner worlds to the Mater House Museum (Calle del Oli, 4), located in an old palace from the 11th and 12th centuries in the Ribera district of Barcelona.

“Gassama and Quintanilla are two very different artists, but what fascinates us are their inner worlds,” says architect and professor Kathrin Golda-Pongratz, the exhibition’s curator along with her husband, Thomas Golda, and the museum’s founder, architect Valentina Asinari di San Marzano. Golda-Pongratz also owns some of the works on display. “Gassama’s work is a very abstract and geometric graphic representation, while Quintanilla’s world is the complete opposite—a very organic world,” Golda-Pongratz explains. While Gassama’s works are not for sale, Quintanilla’s are. Furthermore, both artists share a common thread: their art focuses on their intimate universes, detached from the country that welcomed them, and centered on their personal worlds.

Before this exhibition, which runs until November 16, Gassama was known for a book dedicated to him by curator Alicia Chillida. As for Quintanilla, he and Golda-Pongratz have been friends for twenty years, and his work has been recognized in major museums such as the MoMA in New York and the National Library of France, although he has also remained somewhat of an alternative figure.

Throughout the exhibition, Gassama's houses and deserted places, where he worked as a blacksmith in Senegal, are striking. He only rarely drew living beings, such as a bird or an African pangolin. In contrast, Quintanilla's drawings, paintings, and sculptures are teeming with real and mythological humans and animals, drawing on the Andean world, children's art, and the most dreamlike aspects of Goya. "Both artists also share an attraction to the superfluous object, the industrial product that, stripped of its utility, becomes a vehicle capable of expressing their own personal and independent worlds," say the curators.

"Both artists are collectors in the sense of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who defines a collector as someone who finds an object to add to their collection, an everyday object devoid of any use. Thus, the wine box is no longer a wine box, the wine carton is no longer a wine box, the cardboard box is no longer a melon, egg, or tomato carton; it is simply turned inside out, reused, recycled in the best sense, to represent the artist's inner world," they add.