Gugging Museum

A major figure in Art Brut, Aloïse Corbaz created over 2,000 drawings, most of them double-sided, in an asylum setting. This woman, who dreamed of being an opera singer and was an eternal romantic, had an almost mystical relationship with her work, which was admired by Jean Dubuffet. Today, her work is part of major collections such as the American Folk Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, and the Collection de l’Art Brut. In 2024, a dedicated room to her work was featured at the Arsenale during the Venice Biennale, as part of the exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

After a troubled childhood and a turbulent adolescence, August Walla was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was finally admitted - along with his mother - to the Gugging hospital, near Vienna, in 1970. Resident of the Haus der Künstler (house of artists), he will remain there for the rest of his life. Expressing himself through photography, installation, diversion of objects and typing of manifestos, writing and drawing have become inseparable in his work. A key figure in art brut, collected by David Bowie, Walla is present in a number of collections around the world, including those of the MoMa (New York) or the Milwaukee Art Museum (Wisconsin).

O.T. - as he signed - was an emblematic artist of the Gugging hospital, where he was interned because of the psychosis he began to suffer upon returning from the siege of Stalingrad. His drawings, antitheses of the horror vacui, are characterized by their minimalism, the purity, the economy of means and effects, the sense of balance and space. Admired by Michel Thévoz, who devoted several feature articles to him, he also fascinated David Bowie and Brian Eno, who met and collected him. His works can be found in countless collections, such as those of Arnulf Rainer (Austria), abcd/Bruno Decharme (France) or the Pinacothèque Hervé Lancelin (Luxembourg).

Philipp Schöpke was born in Lower Austria. He attended school for four years, and was forced to leave after repeatedly failing to pass into higher grade levels. As a young man he worked as a manual labourer until 1941, when he was drafted into the German army. Declared unfit, he was immediately discharged, and after a brief period in a psychiatric clinic Schöpke worked in a foundry and later on building sites. His mental problems only increased, with his state of mind swinging from a condition of great agitation to deep depression. He became a permanent resident of the Klosterneuburg psychiatric hospital near Vienna at the age of thirty-five and moved into the Haus der Künstler, an arts[…]

Johann Hauser lived in a displaced persons’ camp with his mother until he was seventeen when he was hospitalized in a mental institution for the firt time. In 1947 he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Gugging, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Initially, he did small farming jobs but soon he showed a taste for drawing. Working primarily with colored pencils, Hauser saturated the paper and drew with a strong and lively palette - mostly women who assert their femininity and sex. There are fighters, “women-canons”, warriors charged with eroticism. He also liked airplanes, helicopters and all sorts of everyday objects. Pr Navratil notes that the style of his drawings[…]