British horror artist Amer Shihab has a really great, unhinged, outsider-y style that’s reminiscent of compulsive doodles by a serial killer, but I think is linework is really great, and some of his less gory pieces are actually quite beautiful.

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Sometimes the most simple of artwork can lead to the most moving of experiences, which is the case with the artwork hanging at the current show at New York’s Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects in Chelsea: Counterpoint: Outsider Art From Japan. Outsider art is a term that is broadly defined, but at its very core it means artwork made by untrained artists, many of which hail from outside of mainstream culture. The show runs until October 9.

The work of artist Matt Leines is a perfect mash up of folk, ethnic and outsider art. It’s smart, colorful, graphic eye candy. In fact, there’s not one piece on his site I wouldn’t sell my hypothetical soul for.

The roughly-hewn, outsider quality to Craig Atkinson’s doodles and collages bely a skillful and careful technique: his portraits of celebrities such as Thom Yorke and Allan Ginsberg are instantly recognizable, and his sense of design and composition reflect a trained eye.

It’s tempting to dismiss Kalup Linzy’s low-budget, gender-bending schtick as fodder for guilty, white curators with outsider art fetishes, but the deftness with which he lampoons black and queer stereotypes through his intricately rendered world is both genuinely entertaining and artistically impressive. Linzy’s characters are lovable yet unnerving for the cultural taboos they make the audience confront — like the personalities that populate John Waters’ films, they make the audience squirm while wryly asking for (but not necessarily expecting) empathy.

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