What is an artist? In 1957, Marcel Duchamp offered one underrated answer: a mediumistic being. He meant that artists are more conduits than masters, channeling energies instead of controlling them. They do not set out knowing what a work will mean—or even what it will be—and, in any case, it will never be one stable thing.
“Fata Morgana,” an exhibition organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan, takes Duchamp’s idea seriously, hosting 78 artists past and present who channel(ed) forces of various kinds. Set in Milan’s Palazzo Morando—a Baroque palace once owned by Contessa Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, who amassed a vast occult library—the show features figures who might not have called themselves artists at all: nuns, mediums, and those once confined to psychiatric institutions. Yet it also includes contemporary stars like Marianna Simnett, Diego Marcon, Rosemarie Trockel, and Kerstin Brätsch, alongside avant-garde icons such as Man Ray and Duchamp himself.
That might sound like a disorienting mash-up, and indeed, at first glance, the show seems chaotic and crowded. But I quickly saw that it’s in fact remarkably tight—and I left wanting even more. Amid the variety, “Fata Morgana” adheres closely to Duchamp’s mediumistic proposition, taking it to its literal and logical conclusion. It also raises the question: when is seeing signs pathological, when is it spiritual, and when is it simply creative?
An untitled drawing by Wilhelmine Assmann from 1905–06.
Courtesy the Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art
Happily, the curators—Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Martha Papini—irreverently disregard such distinctions. And this isn’t just a curatorial stance; art history is filled with intriguing overlaps. One example in the show is a painting by Hector Hippolyte, a Haitian Vodou priest collected by André Breton and included in some of Surrealism’s foundational exhibitions.
The amalgamation also mercifully avoids the Art Brut–style ableism that would frame pathologized artists’ work as somehow more “pure.” Still, thorny power dynamics are unavoidable with self-taught artists. Madge Gill’s posthumous contribution is a real knockout, though it wasn’t meant for our eyes: she made her work exclusively for her spirit guide, Myrninerest (“my inner rest”). Gill began making art under psychiatric care, and her all-over drawings of women recall those by another standout here, Aloïse, whose horror vacui compelled her to fill every inch of the page.
The show opens with a drawing by one of the world’s first diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics, James Tilly Matthews. Matthews feared a gang of “pneumatic manipulators” who used a complex machine called the Air Loom to inject harmful rays and magnetic fluids into his brain. In 1810, he drew an elaborate protective contraption—the plans are on view. Whether he saw the drawing as “art” or a strictly a erious design remains an open question, but the work is wonderfully weird and gloriously irreverent. Matthews’s drawings set the stage for a show fascinated with creativity as compulsion.
A Stanisława Popielska Séance photo from 1913.
Courtesy the Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art
Though there are dozens of works in the show engaging alchemy, theosophy, spiritualism, and the occult, you don’t have to believe in ghosts to have a good time. On view are 1913 photographs documenting Stanisława Popielska’s fraudulent séances, her ectoplasms revealed to be nothing more than string and gauze. The more scientifically inclined will enjoy recently discovered drawings by the analyst Emma Jung—working out symbols developed alongside her famous psychiatrist husband, Carl—and by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who was both a scholar and a spiritualist. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s mesmerizing geometries explored Jungian archetypes and are now held by the Aby Warburg Institute, though they have only recently caught the art world’s attention.
Hilma af Klint: Primordial Chaos, The WU/Rose Series, Group 1, 1906–07.
Courtesy the Hilma af Klint Foundation
One moving throughline is the number of women here who turned to art—or to séances—after losing children, among them Gill, Anna Hackel, and Wilhelmine Assmann. Upstairs, about 20 of Hilma af Klint’s very first abstractions, from her 1905–06 “Primordial Chaos” series, fill a room that feels almost holy, though the show sidesteps Hilma hagiography by including yet more spiritualist women who made abstractions before and alongside her. The music of Hildegard von Bingen—an 11th-century nun both sickly and spiritual—wails through a nearby corridor, while the spiritualist abstractions of Georgiana Houghton, which predate af Klint’s, greet viewers in the first room.
Paradoxically, a canon of these so-called “outsider” visionaries is beginning to emerge—one undeniably riding on the coattails of the af Klint phenomenon and of Gioni’s own 2013 Venice Biennale. Familiar figures like Minnie Evans, Madge Gill, Aloïse, Corita Kent, Anna Zemánková, and Carol Rama make memorable appearances. Yet new treasure troves keep surfacing in attics and archives: the Emma Jung drawings were discovered only recently, and Madame Favre’s hypnotic pencil portraits—faces with painstakingly rendered hair merging with other faces—were just found in a spiritualist library.
Most haunting of all, though, are the wall labels. I found them informative and clear—only to learn that they were written by AI and then edited by humans, as disclosed in the catalog. The curators decided to join forces with the artists in channeling energies and embracing chance. The labels didn’t always focus on the most relevant aspects of a work—making human editors like myself not yet obsolete!—but they were lucid and surprisingly engaging.
Of the show’s sole Duchamp piece—a silver candy wrapper inscribed with the equation A GUEST + A HOST = A GHOST—the AI writes memorably:
“For Duchamp, the creative process was a two-part collaboration between the artist and the spectator. The artist, as medium, works in a trancelike state, creating without a full understanding of the final result. The spectator’s role is to decode, interpret, and ultimately complete the work. This transfer of authority from creator to viewer was radical, asserting that the art object is simply a catalyst for deeper engagement.”
Herein lies the show’s boldest thesis, which I emphatically endorse: the old binary—outsider artists as naïve, conceptualists as knowing—is all wrong. First-generation conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt conceived conceptualism as placing form in service of ideas and worked with clear plans. But Duchamp, that proto-conceptualist magician, wanted art to reveal what the mind cannot plan: the accidents and energies that defy control. “Fata Morgana” sides decisively with the latter, showing that to channel is not to abdicate thought but to let it take unpredictable, ecstatic forms. The result is a trove of delights.
