Louden, Albert

Education: left school at 15 without qualifications.
Profession/occupation: van driver, weight lifter.
Art form/medium: pastel drawing.
Start artwork: at 19 for own pleasure; in 1979  after seeing exhibition Outsiders at the Hayward Gallery, London he contacted collector-curator Victor Musgrave.
Relevant info: Louden stated that his art is created ‘from the unconscious’, without plan.
(Solo-) exhibitions: 1985, Serpentine Gallery, London.
References: www.outsiderart.co.uk/louden
Outsider Art Sourcebook, (Raw Vision) 2016, p.148

Although Albert Louden toyed over the years with higher mathematics and left-wing politics, from about 1962 Louden decided to concentrate on art. It was Victor Musgrave, the co-organiser of the Outsiders show at the Hayward Gallery, who ‘discovered’ Louden in 1979.

Louden paints hallucinatory images of people, whose spatial positioning and individual body parts seem to be governed by some secret hieratic law. All his work shares in common an almost mystical feeling for the life force which beats in all things; that connectivity which the visionary perceives as dissolving and mutating form.

Albert Louden
1943 Blackpool, England -