Analysis of Outsider Art in Visual Works of People with a Mental Health Condition (Case Study: Hejazi Mental Hospital)

The term outsider art was coined by Jean Dubuffet, a prominent French painter after World War II, which refers to art that originates from people who are somehow alienated from society. These people include people with mental health conditions, prisoners, fragile people who are suffering from severe trauma, people with an addiction living on the outskirts, and people like that. These people have not seen any teaching about this, and they create works of art against the rules and only based on their dreams and imaginations. The purpose of this research is to examine outsider art in the works of people with mental health conditions, and I will discuss how to consider the works of these patients as natural art. For this purpose, I investigated the works of people with a mental health condition in the art workshop in the Occupational Therapy Unit of Hejazi Mental Hospital of Mashhad. I examined the artworks of these patients from the point of view of outsider art. In this workshop, which received work from patients for three months, I found several people with a hidden talent in the field of art. In this research, we considered art therapy apart from this research Because the primary goal of art therapy is treatment, Not artistic creation. The works produced in this workshop by people with mental health conditions were created with the utmost freedom of action, without any previous training, and only to express their personal feelings at the moment. In the meantime, the works of some patients had an artistic value worthy of attention, which the patient created unconsciously and with inner enthusiasm. He was unaware of this and had no claim in this field, so this is the rawness of the works. It shows us these people, and we can consider them as raw and distant artists from society who need to be introduced and seen in the artistic society.