The Art Brut exhibition at the House at the Stone Bell is an exhilarating and bewildering experience. Encompassing works from the mid-19th century to the present, it is the most comprehensive show of this genre ever displayed in the Czech Republic.

Art Brut is also known as naive art, raw art or outsider art, but the best description is free art, because the artists work free of any concerns about public acceptance or the opinions of critics and gallerists, and mostly unaware of artistic trends and styles.

The names of these artists are by definition obscure, and practically all of them have spent most of their lives in psychiatric hospitals or as extreme social recluses. Some have had an art education or even established careers in other areas. Their unusual life circumstances add another dimension to their works.

The pieces in this exhibit by more than 100 artists from around the world are taken from the renowned abcd collection connected with Bruno Decharme, one of Art Brut's greatest collectors. Besides handling the art collection, abcd is a research group of writers, psychiatrists, pyschoanalysts, art historians, philosophers and others interested in promoting Art Brut through exhibitions, documentary films, publications and research.

In 2003, abcd Prague was established by Terezie Zemánková. She and Barbora Šafářová curated this show for Prague, appropriately with a special focus on Czech Art Brut. Zemánková and Šafářová divided the works into three sections: Inner Voices, Parallel Worlds and Transformation of the Body.

Many artists in this genre began their artistic activity guided by voices — in their heads or inspired directly from some higher power. Automatism is thus a basic principle of Art Brut, provoked by hallucinations or invoked by a spiritualistic medium.

Thus, the Inner Voices section includes many works with gods and religious imagery, such as Consuelo "Chelo" Gonzalez Amezcua's drawings suffused with Mexican myths and pre-Columbian gods and kings. Augustin Lesage's paintings, which at a glance resemble Persian carpets, astound the viewer with minute details of African and Egyptian gods or larger scenes from the Bible.

Other standouts from this section include Fleury-Joseph Crépin's bright and prescient multicultural alterpieces on canvas from the 1930s, which were originally owned by André Breton, and the nine-piece series of small drawings by Edmund Monsiel, with their infinite number of heads.

The section Parallel Worlds reveals visions from the artists' imaginary worlds, which tend to combine images, texts, collages, poems, architectural plans, chemical and mathematical formulae, diagrams, and so on. Instead of recognizable gods and myths, these works portray rulers, heroes and kings drawn from the artist's imaginary universe.

Zdenďk Košek's fantastical world seething in sexuality is revealed in this section in notebooks, cut-out collages and small drawings. There is also a short film documenting Košek's life and worldview, directed by Bruno Decharme.

The centerpiece of this section (and the show) is the perverse work of Henry Darger, whose life work of text and large watercolor drawings is the saga of the Vivian Girls versus the Glandeco-Angelinians. Done in 15 volumes numbering more than 15,000 pages, it was discovered after his landlord helped him to move into a nursing home in Chicago, just a few years before his death in 1973.

This section also features five works by Anna Zemánková, the best-known Czech artist of this genre. Zemánková's exotica is a gorgeous symmetry of Native American symbolism and her own spiritualistic creations combining pastels, ink and embroidery.

The final section's theme, Metamorphosis of the Body, seems redundant after Darger's hermaphroditic Vivian Girls and Košek's graffitied pornography in the previous section. However, this section highlights both internal and external deformations of the body, including monsters and other beings. The bizarre bodily interiors of Luboš Pilný and the mystical delicacy of Chiyuki Sakagami's Atchaeopteryyx or Phoenix are utterly mesmerizing.

Art Brut can be a treacherous art form for some, because it crosses the boundaries of established divisions with such impunity, whether by gender, genres or national identities. And as this exhibit shows most effectively, whether the work is from the 1800s or our own times, the best Art Brut is thoroughly original to each artist and looks perpetually contemporary.