Founded in 2003 by Jon Beinart as the “beinArt Australian Surreal Art Collective” and expanded internationally in 2006 as the “beinArt International Surreal Art Collective”, the beinArt Collective has long been a web destination, publisher and sponsor of group exhibitions for artists working in the areas of strange, surreal, fantastic, psychedelic, visionary and outsider art.
Aficionados of these genres have found the website, and its reserve of artist galleries, missing for a time now, while founder Jon Beinart endeavored to bring the site up to date, reduce the strain of upkeep on the multiple galleries and generally bring the site into line with the modern web, streamlined and functioning more as a lighthouse than a repository.
The good news is that the beinArt Collective site is now back from the shadows; and, given its nature, has of course, brought the shadows back with it.
The new beinart.org website functions as a blog and a listing of the most prominent artists from the collective’s formerly over-extended list, now linking directly to their own blogs and websites instead of trying to maintain local files.
There is a cornucopia of the weird, wild, wooly and often wonderful to be found among the links and articles — but, as when turning over leaves in a strange forest, I must warn the uninitiated that you never know what you will find lurking on the forest floor. Much of the work here delves deliberately into the disconcerting edges of the strange, and some may find it not to their liking.
Others, however, will delight in the assortment of the imaginative, bizarre and often beautifully realized work that abounds.
[Note: the sites linked, and the beinArt site itself, contain an assortment of work that can be considered NSFW, for a variety of reasons. I will also issue a Timesink Warning.]
(Images above: Naoto Hattori, Mike Worrall, Peter Gric, Dan May, Dino Valls, Ernst Fuchs, Sandra Yagi, Scott Musgrove, Travis Louie, Greg Simkins, Lucy Hardie, Maura Holden, David M. Bowers, Alex Grey, Jon Beinart)
