Willem van Genk

1927-2005 · The Hague, Netherlands

From a small flat in The Hague he mapped the transit systems of cities he had barely visited, panorama after panorama, and built a fleet of trolleybuses from rubbish.

The life

Van Genk grew up the only boy among many sisters, bullied by an authoritarian father, and found sanctuary in stations, maps and the hum of overhead wires. Interrogated as a boy by the Gestapo, he fixated on the protective power of raincoats and collected dozens. He trained briefly in graphic work but rejected instruction, and from the 1950s produced vast urban panoramas that made him, by the end of his life, one of Europe’s most revered outsider artists.

The work

Collaged cityscapes of Moscow, Tokyo, Prague and imagined metropolises, layered with lettering, propaganda and rail lines that knot the sheet together like wiring, plus his sculptural fleet of trolleybuses built from card, tape and scrap. Obsession organised into systems, systems bent back into art.

Why we love them

He proves the connecting theme of this whole field: build the world you need from the one you were given.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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