The art of a homeless man 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 from at least 2008 to 2012. He painted houses and furniture, everything he didn't have, on small tables he made by recycling wine crates from Vila Vinateca, and the 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 join an uncle. No one has heard anything since. 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 art brut. And now his work returns to the public eye alongside that of the Peruvian, Paris-based 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 neighborhood 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 curator of the exhibition with her husband, Thomas Golda, and the museum's founder, architect Valentina Asinari di San Marzano. She is also the owner of some of the works on display. "Gassama's is a very abstract and geometric graphic representation, while Quintanilla's world is the exact opposite, a very organic world," explains Golda-Pongratz. While Gassama's works on display are not for sale, Quintanilla's are. Furthermore, both artists have in common that their art focuses on their intimate worlds, distant from the country that welcomed them, and focuses on their personal universes.

Before this exhibition, which will remain on display until November 16, Gassama was known for a book curator Alicia Chillida dedicated to him. As for Quintanilla, he and Golda-Pongratz have been friends for twenty years, and his work has been recognized in major museums such as MoMA in New York and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, although he has also remained an alternative.

Throughout the exhibition, the houses and uninhabited places of Gassama, who worked as a blacksmith in Senegal, draw attention. Only rarely did he draw living beings, such as a bird or an African pangolin. In contrast, Quintanilla's drawings, paintings, and sculptures are full of real and mythological humans and animals, somewhere between the Andean world, children's art, and the most dreamlike Goya. "Both artists are also united by an attraction to the superfluous object, the industrial product that, stripped of its usefulness, 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 a person who finds an object to add to their collection, an everyday object devoid of all use. Thus, the wine box is no longer a wine box, the wine carton is no longer a wine box, the carton melons, eggs, or tomatoes; it is simply turned upside down, reused, recycled in the best sense, to represent the artist's inner world," they add.