James Castle

Entirely self-taught and hailing from rural Idaho, artist James Castle produced an astonishing and prolific body of work with a remarkable visual and conceptual range. Born profoundly deaf in 1899, Castle's work was initially ‘discovered’ in the 1950s and 1960s, and has since been exhibited widely by major museums including a traveling retrospective organized in 2008 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His favorite medium and method of working was developed as a child, when Castle began creating ‘ink’ by mixing stove soot with saliva and applying it with sharpened sticks and cotton to such found materials as product packaging and discarded paper.While Castle is sometimes referred to as a ‘folk’, ‘vernacular’ or ‘outsider’ artist, there is a profound sophistication in his work.Visually and artistically he was remarkably literate, deploying perspective, foreshortening, graphic elements, volume and weight, light and shadow in his work. His use of negative space, investigations of deconstructed forms, and the development of an abstract art based on geometric patterning and formal reduction, all place him well beyond the outsider artist realm. James Castle: Show and Store, an in-depth survey of James Castles work, will open at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in May 2011. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 full-colour reproductions, James Castle: Show and Store examines Castle’s drawings, colour-wash works, cardboard and paper constructions, and word, sign and symbol works.