Museum Gugging

Gugging in Wienerwald near to Klosterneuburg has become a significant destination in the international art world.

The art of the Gugging Group has been attributed to the Art Brut art movement. The painter Jean Dubuffet, who created this term, described it as ‘exquisite, bitter, original art’ with the highest personal and unconventional form of expression.

Art trailblazers

The ‘House of Artists’ at the former site of the state mental institution in Gugging is not part of the hospital; rather it is a residential community. Leo Navratil, psychiatrist at the former state mental institution in Maria Gugging in Wienerwald, noticed that a few of his patients had produced paintings that did not fit with the group of laypeople nor the group of psychotic patients. This new form of artistic expression produced in Gugging, which has found its place in art history as Art Brut, astounded the artistic avant garde, as it was art without precedence. ‘Together with the House of Artists, the Gugging Museum and the public Gugging Studio, the Gugging Gallery has become a place for art, which is unique...,’ said Prof. Johann Feilacher, who founded the Gugging Gallery in 1994. Painters such as Johann Hauser, Oswald Tschirtner and August Walla are now listed among the most famous artists in the world.

Tschirtner from head to toe!

The Gugging Museum will be exhibiting ‘oswald tschirtner! Das ganze beruht auf gleichgewicht’ from 13 February to 27 September 2020, focusing on the third most famous person in the history of the museum Two-hundred and sixty pieces spanning from sheets to small and large canvases will reflect the different creative periods and facets of Oswald Tschirtner, who is regarded as one of the most successful Gugging artists. ‘Tschirtner's path to becoming an artist wasn’t mapped out in anyway,’ said Johann Feilacher, curator of the exhibition. ‘There is hardly any other artist who is so closely linked to Gugging: Struck down by mental illness during his time in a French prisoner of war camp in the Second World War, Tschirtner was in Gugging for a total of fifty years, a time in which I was allowed to care for him,’ explains Feilacher.  With his genderless Kopffüßlern cephalopod sculptures, Oswald Tschirtner teaches us to concentrate on fundamentals and also shows us how he feels. The title of the exhibition ‘das ganze beruht auf gleichgewicht’ [Everything is based on balance] is also the title of two his drawings. On the one hand, it didn't matter to him what other people thought about him or his art. On the other, peace within himself was his highest aim. Many events such as focus tours, the Gugging Guglhupf cake, the open creative workshop or the parent-child creative sessions accompany the exhibition, which is easy to reach in only 34 minutes by public transport from Wien Heligenstadt.