mUSeum gugging! 20 years art in simple English

The museum gugging opened in 2006. It is part of the “art brut center gugging,” together with the “House of Artists,” “galerie gugging,” “atelier gugging” and the “Private Foundation – Artists from Gugging.” Working on art, presenting art and life in Gugging are all closely linked together here.

The art from Gugging began in the mental hospital in the village of Maria Gugging. This hospital was founded in 1885 and closed in 2007. Today the area formerly occupied by the hospital contains the “art brut center gugging” and the ISTA research center (Institute of Science and Technology Austria).

In the late 1950s, the psychiatrist Leo Navratil began to recognize that some of his patients had a lot of artistic talent. He started deliberately supporting these patients’ work as artists. Known as the “Gugging Artists,” they became famous around the world.

The French artist Jean Dubuffet established “Art Brut.” He said it was untrained art created in the moment, an art form free from any university education. 

The museum gugging is closely linked with “Art Brut.” Dubuffet included the Gugging artists as part of Art Brut. The general public often connects “Art Brut” with people who are not part of society or are seen as outsiders. This leads to forms of stigmatization. People are now wondering more and more if it is still a good idea to divide people up like this. But all of these discussions have one idea in common. We should recognize art by people with disabilities without thinking about their conditions. And we should not just see their biography or diagnosis when we look at their art. 

The museum gugging always thought it was important to see “Gugging Art” as just as important as other forms of art. The museum sends a signal that we should appreciate and recognize the value of the art from Gugging and the artists who make it. The museum gugging has already gone a long way in this regard, and it will keep moving forward.

museum gugging.! 20 jahre kUNSt

Das ist der Titel der Jubiläumsausstellung. Er bedeutet: Kunst bei uns, für euch und mit euch. Wir wollen damit sagen und zeigen, dass Inklusion im Museum für uns sehr wichtig ist. Kunst entsteht an diesem Ort und soll möglichst allen Menschen zugänglich sein. Der Austausch zwischen Besucher*innen, Künstler*innen und Mitarbeiter*innen kann und soll stattfinden und lebendig sein.

In der Ausstellung „museum gugging.! 20 jahre kUNSt“ sieht man 20 Gugginger Künstler*innen aus verschiedenen Zeiträumen. Gezeigt werden Kunstwerke von den 1960er‑Jahren bis in die Gegenwart. Wenn historische Werke auf aktuelle Arbeiten treffen, entsteht ein Dialog zwischen den Künstler*innen. So wird sichtbar, was sie verbindet und wo sich ihre Ausdrucksformen unterscheiden.

Zwei Künstler*innen stehen im Mittelpunkt der Ausstellung:
2026 wäre Johann Hauser 100 Jahre alt geworden und August Walla 90 Jahre.

Die Ausstellung zeigt außerdem sechs Themen:

• den Briefwechsel zwischen Jean Dubuffet und Leo Navratil
• Literatur in Gugging von Ernst Herbeck und Edmund Mach
• die Gugginger Künstlerinnen
• die NS‑Medizinverbrechen in Gugging
• die Ausstellung Pareidolien aus dem Jahr 1970
• das „Haus der Künstler“, das sein 40‑jähriges Bestehen feiert

Im letzten Raum zeigt das Museum im Jubiläumsjahr vier wechselnde kleine Ausstellungen. Dieses Format heißt „im guggkasten.!“. Es bedeutet:
Vier Wände. Vier Wechsel. Vier Besuche.
Und viele neue Entdeckungen.

2026 is the 40th anniversary of the “House of Artists”and the 25th anniversary of atelier gugging. This room focuses on these two places. The Gugging Artists still make their art in them today.

“House of Artists”

The psychiatrist Leo Navratil began using drawing as a method for diagnosing patients in the 1950s. He recognized the artistic talent of some of his patients.

18 patients who made art moved into a building in 1981. Navratil called it the “Center for Art and Psychotherapy.”

It was at the edge of the property containing the mental hospital. In 1983, Johann Feilacher became the assistant of Navratil. Feilacher is a psychiatrist and sculptor.The patients started working on the decoration of the outside of the building with him. Paintings on walls and on the outside of the buildings establish the character of this place.

Johann Feilacher became director in 1986. The “Center for Art and Psychotherapy” became the “House of Artists.” Feilacher believed it was important to look at the art without connecting it with the artists’ mental conditions. The art and support for the artists and their independence have been the most important things ever since. Feilacher created structures to meet these goals and organized international exhibitions. In 2006, he founded the museum gugging with Nina Katschnig.

In 2011, we renovated the “House of Artists” and built an addition. The group of artists in the “House of Artists” has changed in the last 20 years. Older artistshave died and new, younger artists have moved in. An additional studio space called “Brüt:kasten” opened in 2025.

Today, 14 artists can live and work in the “House of Artists.” The focus is on making art, controlling their own lives, independence and well-being.

atelier gugging

In 2001, the atelier gugging was established in the building next to the “House of Artists.” The Gugging Artists can create their art there. But new, talented artists and guests who are visiting for the day can come and work freely, without anyone telling them what to do. Many internationally famous artists are making art in the atelier gugging. These include Leopold Strobl and Laila Bachtiar.

Rudolf Horacek used black acrylic paint to create a picture of a large head and upper body. This image has become a symbol of the museum gugging. He painted it in 1984. Horacek has always been interested in people. He draws and paints them in a simple and concentrated way that makes us feel a certain sense of tension when we look at them.

Horacek began drawing in 1978. He usually only shows people’s heads. But they aren’ttraditional portraits. We see many different spaces inside his pictures of heads. These contain memories, thoughts and feelings that are very personal and come from the artist’s own life.

You can see this personal approach best in his less famous pencil and colored pencil drawings. Horacek repeatedly drew on top of what he had already drawn. Parts of the drawings disappeared while new and interesting forms appeared. He mostly began by drawing the eyes, nose and mouth. After that, he added a level that tells a story. It is made up of people, animals,words, numbers, letters or objects. He often also added his name and the place where he was born: Mannswörth.

Horacek was born in 1915 in Mannswörth, Austria. He worked as an assistant gardener. Horacek was sent to the mental hospital in Gugging when he was 24. He began living in the “House of Artists” in 1981 and died there in 1986.

Franz Kernbeis drew familiar objects in his pictures, but he changed them based on his own special way of representing things. First he drew the objects with a pencil, and then he divided them into little shapes by drawing lines across them. This makes hispictures look three dimensional, and he used colors that make this effect even stronger. Bulgingand round shapesappeared. This makes the objects seem like something else that is familiar to us. The picturesare drawn with energetic, sweepinglines. This makes them look like they are moving. For example, his cars seem to be rushing past us.

Kernbeis always wrote a title, his name and the date on his pictures. The titlesoften have spellingmistakes, and he also wrote the date in his own special way. In 2000, Kernbeis began writing the years like this: 2000.1, 2000.2, …

He drew lots of plants, animals and farming vehicles because he had worked on his parents’farm. The plow was also the titleof the first exhibition at the new museum gugging, which opened in 2006. When Kernbeis spelled the word plow, it became “pow.”

Kernbeis was born in Prigglitz in the district of Neunkirchen, Austria, in 1935. He worked as a farmhand at his parents’farm. He came to the mental hospital in Gugging in 1955. Kernbeis began drawing in the 1960s. In 1981, he moved into the “House of Artists.” He died there in 2019.

Leonhard Fink’s art is centeredaround richly decoratedmaps. These pencil drawings show countries, regions and cities.

He sketches the landmarks of these landscapes, such as mountains, lakes, streets, churches, towers, public buildings, bridges, tunnels and trains. He represents them in two and three dimensions and from unnatural viewpoints. Sometimes we see them from above, sometimes from the front and sometimes from the side.

Fink bases the size of things on his own personal scale.

He draws things bigger or smaller based on how important they are. Streets with cars are especially important. They spread across the whole picture like a spiderweb. He writes the names of the mountains, lakes and towns. His artworks also include fantasy worlds. The picture“THE ANIMAL OF UNIQUE HORN WAS BORN IN THE TOWN HORN” is an example from 2018.

Fink was born in 1982. He grew up in the town of Weidling, near Klosterneuburg, Austria. His father was a geographer and geologist. Leonard Fink was also interested in maps.

He was 17 when he created the first drawings that showed his artistic talent. He regularly went to the atelier gugging from 2001 to 2020. That is where he found his own very powerful form of personal expression.

Philipp Schöpke’s art is centered around the human figure.

His artistic talent was not discovered until the 1980s, but he had been drawing since the 1960s.

He drew strange-looking, transparent figures: you can see their organs inside of them. Heart, ribs, intestines and sex organs are drawn clearly. The heads have a lot more teeth than normal and lots of hair. After a while, he also started drawing everyday events. The picture “Soccer Match” is an example from 1983.

Beginning in the 1980s and continuing in the 1990s, color became more and more important in his pictures. His people and ghost-like combinations of people and animals stayed the same. He began drawing on top of them with colored pencils, crayons and charcoal. This gives the pictures a sense of depth and a strong sense of movement. He created large pictures with layers of color, and some of them became fully abstract.

Schöpke was born in the Lower Austrian town of Erlach in 1921. He came to the mental hospital in Gugging in 1956. He began living in the “House of Artists” in 1981 and died there in 1998.

The history of Gugging does not just show how the patients’ artworks developed. It also shows the social conditions of their time. And we become able to see what the situation was like for people who lived in institutions. It is very clear that only men were visible as artists in the beginning. This also fits with the image that dominated the art sceneat that time.

The psychiatrist Leo Navratil introduced drawing as a method for diagnosing patients in the 1950s. It helped him to recognize the situation his patients were in. He supported patients with artistic talent. He was head of the men’s department, so he almost only worked with men.

Women patients also drew, but this was not seen as artistic expression. Erna Navratil, who was a psychiatrist as well as Leo Navratil’s wife, was the first person to make the women patients’ drawings more visible.

Karoline Rosskopf and Emma Brosch were the first women artists from Gugging. They had their own very individual visual language. Their artworks are very important because they were the first artworks by women patients in Gugging.

Karoline Rosskopf
She was born in 1911. She made small drawings that are simplified and geometrical. Her drawings are centered around people.

Emma Brosch
She was born in 1900.Her drawings combinefigures and handwritten texts. We can probably recognize autobiographical elements in her writings and drawings.
Later women artists include Barbara Demlczuk and Laila Bachtiar.

Barbara Demlczuk
She was born in 1945. Demlczuk created pictures with lots of fantasy. Some of her pictures look a little dream-like or unusual.

Laila Bachtiar
She was born in 1971. Bachtiar is very important for the art from Gugging. She is the only woman who has made lots of artworks there. She shows that women also play an important role in Gugging art. In an art world where men still have a lot of control, she is an important pioneer.

You will see more artworks by Laila Bachtiarin the next room.

The Nazis also committed major crimes at the mental hospital in Gugging. Some of the Gugging Artists suffered from Nazi violence and cruelty. For example, Josef Bachler was at the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany, from 1938 to 1945.

The so-called “Action T4” lasted from 1939 to 1941: the Nazis used gas to kill more than 70,000 people at six “killing centers.” Hartheim Castle was one of these centers. 675 people from the mental hospital in Gugging were sent to Hartheim Castle and killed there. Some of them were children and teenagers.

The Nazis stopped using gas to kill patients in August of 1941, but they did not stop killingpeople. Now the patients were killed directly in the mental hospitals. Today this is called the “decentralized euthanasia” period. Euthanasia means helping someone die. But the Nazis did not want to help people end their lives in the best way possible, they murdered people. The Nazis believed that some people are worth less than other people.They also believed that those people should die because of this. They thought that only some people are worthy of life, and they believed that only these people should remain alive.
Many crimes were committed at the mental hospital in Gugging between 1941 and 1945. Patients were given bad care, they were hungry,they became sick and lots of them died. The doctor Emil Gelny killed hundreds of patients between 1943 and 1945. He gave them poison and prescribed deadly doses of medical drugs. He also built an electric machine for killing patients and used it to murder them with electric shocks. Gelny approved 360 killings.

At least that is how many were written down. The real number is probably much higher. Rudolf Lonauer was the director of the killing center in Hartheim. He also killed around 100 people when he visited Gugging.

175 young people from the children’s department in Gugging were sent to the “Spiegelgrund” in Vienna. This was a place where children and teenagers were killed: the Nazis called this “child euthanasia.” At least 98 of them were killed there.

The Nazi period was more cruel than any other period in Austria. We have to remember this time so that the people who were killed are not forgotten. We are responsible for making sure our culture keeps their memory alive.

Erotic themes already appear in Johann Korec’s early pictures. You can see lovers and erotic scenes in his artworks. But the circus was also an important subject for him. His memories from the war appear in his pictures in the form of soldiers, tanks and weapons.

Korec developed his own way of drawing. First, he looked at newspapers and collected the pictures he liked. When he drew, he copied scenes from these newspapers on a sheet of paper. He drew quickly and sometimes changed the image he was copying. At times, this led to completely new scenes.

He copied the outlines with writing ink, drawing ink or ballpoint pen. Then he filled them in with watercolors and gouache. He began drawing without copying in the 1980s, but he still used outlines.

He wrote on almost all of his pictures. These texts were as important to him as the drawings. Drawingand writing were both important characteristics of his artworks.

Laila Bachtiar drawsin color as well as black. Both styles are closely linked together becausethey start from the same point: a network of lines. Bachtiar’s drawings have become more and more dense over the years. You could still see the pencil lines when she began. In 2003, she started drawing on top of them more and more, and they disappeared. Her subject matter often fills the complete picture. She uses a range of tones from black to light gray.

This fills her pictures with a sense of tension and movement. They are very expressive.

Bachtiar’s main subject is the animal world. This includes local animals like cats, ducks and rabbits. But it also includes exotic animals like zebras or spiders.People are mostly shown from the front. Nature and objects can also be found in her pictures.

The artist signs her works with her first name. She writes it in capital letters and then adds numbers. But the numbers do not record the date. They are codes that only she understands, and they are very personal.

Bachtiar was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1971. Her parents are musical. Her motherplays the cello,and her fatherstudied singing, trumpet and piano. In the early 1990s, she often went to the “House of Artists.” She was the first woman artist to come there for the day to work on her art. She has worked in the atelier gugging since 2003.

Oswald Tschirtner’s worksare minimalist. His most famous subject is the sexless “headfooter.” It shows a person with a very small upper body and very long arms and legs.

Most of his artworks are little ink drawings on white paper. He also started making bigger pictures in 1980. He mostly used permanent marker: first on paper and then on canvas.

He added color to some of his artworks. We find simple things like clothing, everyday objects or plants and animals in his pictures. He draws all of them in a very expressive way. The forms of the objects are oftenonly suggested and almost abstract. For example, Tschirtner drew a handkerchief as a square with four lines. We can only recognize it because “Handkerchief” is the title of the picture. Almost all of his pictures have a title written along their top edge.

Tschirtner was born in Perchtoldsdorf, Austria, in 1920.He started making art in 1971. He moved into the “House of Artists” in 1981 and died there in 2007. Tschirtner was a very respected and successful artist.

Franz Kamlander’s art is centered around images of animals.

He mostly draws these animals from the side, and he only uses a little color. Many of the pictures only have one color and are drawn in pencil or black colored pencil. Cows were his most important subject, and he drew them hundreds of times in colors like purple, yellow and red. The cow became his trademark.

In the beginning, Kamlander also drew people. He mostly drew women who are either nude or have different clothing and hairstyles. Three wavy, parallel lines are also characteristic of his pictures. For Kamlander, these were a kind of signature and they showed that the pictures were his.

Kamlander was born in Hainburg, Austria, in 1920. He grew up on a farm. He began living in the “House of Artists” in Gugging in 1981 and died there in 1999.

Arnold Schmidt works a lot with pictures of people. His artworks are very similar,but his body of work is very large. He draws people with colored pencils, charcoal,crayons and acrylicpaint. At first he worked on paper, and then he also started using canvas in the 1980s.

Schmidt mostly works with circles. To create them, he draws circular lines on top of and next to each other, usinglots of color. He forms his figures out of these circles. Upper body, arms, legs and face are made up of these circles. The artworks have become more and more expressive over the years, and new motifs have been added. These include birds, bicycles and airplanes.
Most of the figures stand alone or are lined up in a group of two or three. They are sexless. But we sometimes find women: they have long hair.

Arnold Schmidt was born in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, in 1959. He has lived in the “House of Artists” in Gugging since 1986.

He regularly goes to the atelier gugging, where he creates almost all of his artworks.

Jean Dubuffet and Leo Navratil wrote many letters to each other between 1966 and 1984. These letters are very important for the history of Gugging Art. This is the firsttime they have been examined in detail and shown in an exhibition. We learn how Dubuffet and Navratil slowly got closer to each other while writing about 40 letters. We also see how the art from Gugging became more famous during that time – around the world.

Early on, in 1966, Dubuffet became interested in the art of the patients at the mental hospital then known as the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging.” He especially liked Johann Hauser’s artworks. In the beginning, Dubuffet and Navratil saw things differently.

Dubuffet thought that art should be made completely freely, without the influence of therapy or the outsideworld. He saw Art Brut as an art that was created spontaneously.

Navratil stood in between two fields: psychiatric research and art. That began to change in the middle of the 1970s.

Michel Thévoz helped make this change happen. He was the director of the “Collection de l’Art Brut.” He started working very closely with Navratil:

Many drawings from Gugging were bought or given as gifts, exhibitions were planned and a complete volume was published just about the Gugging Artists. This led to one of the most important groups of works by the artists from Gugging in the “Collection de l’art Brut.” The letters reveal more than differences of opinion. They also show the way both men developed more and more respect for each other. In the end, Dubuffet and Navratil shared the same goal.

They both wantedt o preserve the distinctive creativity of the Gugging Artists.

Jean Dubuffet was born in 1901 and died in 1985. He was a very important 20th-century artist. He is seen as the most important pioneer in the field of Art Brut. He searched for art that did not follow the rules of traditional art. In the 1940s, he began to become interested in forms of expression that had developed outside the traditional art world. In 1949, he published his manifesto, whose title is “Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art.” He explains a new idea in it: 
art should come from within the artist, crude or raw, free and without the influence of culture. Dubuffet saw Art Brut as the opposite of the respectable art world. He was not interested in adaptation or imitation.

Leo Navratil was born in 1921 and died in 2006. He was an Austrian psychiatrist and an important person in the development of the Gugging Artists. He began working at the mental hospital in Gugging in the 1950s. He started supporting the artistic work of the patients. Navratil recognized the independent artistic value of their artworks. He founded the “Center for Art and Psychotherapy” in 1981. It has been called the “House of Artists” since 1986. The Gugging Artists work and live there. He began publishing and exhibiting the artworks in the middle of the 1960s. Navratil never looked at his patients’ art separately from their psychological conditions or illnesses. In this sense, he stood in opposition to Dubuffet.

Leopold Strobl’s artworks mostly show landscapes and towns. His pictures also include buildings, churches and characteristic Lower Austrian lanes lined with wine cellars. Most of the time, there are no people in the pictures.But if you look closely, you can often find them hidden behind the areas covered in black.

His artworks look like shadows from the past. Strobl draws on top of small pictures that he cuts out of newspapers. He uses black, green and yellow colored pencils to draw over these clippings. He covers up people, cars or other vehicles and animals with black colored pencil. The sky is very important in his artworks, and he covers it with green.

Strobl covers the other parts of the picture with yellow. We very often find a hill or mountain in the middle of the picture or along its edge. Strobl draws them in black colored pencil, and they are very important to him as a religious artist. They reach toward God and represent the “upward striving of religion.”

Strobl was born in Mistelbach, Austria, in 1960. He had already started making art as a child. He began visiting the atelier gugging in 2002, and he came almost every day in the early years.

Strobl has been working at his homes in Poysdorf and Kritzendorf since about 2019. His artworks were shown at the main exhibition of the 60th “Biennale di Venezia”.

Josef Bachler’s drawings are very simplified. He draws people with just a few clear lines.His artworks seem complete, and you do not expect him to work more on them.

Bachler worked from memory and from pictures of his subject matter. He mostlydrew in pencilon little sheetsof drawing paper. Everything in his drawings is very exact. He only used colored pencils a little,for example, to surround figureswith a colored line or to mark them. You very rarely see areas filled in with color.

Bachler was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1914. He grew up in an orphanage. He worked in construction, as a roofer. In 1938, the Nazis sent him to the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. He was not freed until 1945. After the war, he worked as a roofer again and got married. Bachler came to the mental hospital in Gugging in 1970. He lived there until he died in 1979.

Günther Schützenhöfer develops a dense combination of form and shape in his drawings, and there is nothing else like it. He uses pencil and colored pencilsto draw airplanes and everydayobjects. He always focusesvery closely on one part of them, and he always draws in a very exact and rhythmic way. For example, there are lines with contrasts of light and dark that make them seem to vibrate.

Schützenhöfer was born in the town of Mödling, Austria, in 1965. He lived in different homes for children until he was 18. He spent many of those years in the former “Children’s Building” at the mental hospital in Gugging. That building now contains the museum gugging. After he was sent to live at various places in Lower Austria, he came back to Gugging. His artistic talent was discovered in 1999. He lives in the “House of Artists.”

Heinrich Reisenbauer created art for almost 40 years. He made his first drawings in 1986. You can already recognize his style in them. In 1989, he started making his first pictures that repeat the same objects again and again. Most of them are everyday objects, such as umbrellas, tables, flowers or apples. At first, he made little pictures on white paper. Reisenbauer mostly drew with pencil and colored pencils. In the 1990s, he started also making larger drawings on paper. He began using permanentmarkers and acrylic paint to make large pictures on canvas in early 2000.

All of his artworks follow the same form.He uses black outlines to draw his subject on the white background. Then he fills these in with one or more colors. Most of his pictures only use one color: yellow, red, blue or green. Reisenbauer lines up the little images next to each other and above each other. When we look at these rows, they have a very strong effect on us.

Reisenbauer was born near the town of Wiener Neustadt, Austria, in 1938. He grew up on a farm. He went to a secondary school for talented students. Reisenbauer began living in the mental hospital in Gugging in 1956. In 1986, he moved into the “House of Artists.” He died there in 2025.

The Gugging Artists also included poets and other writers. Ernst Herbeck and EdmundMach were especially important.

Edmund Mach (1929–1996) wrote about being poor and his family, disappointments and deep desires. America was especially important for him. He very strongly wished to be in America. He connected it with freedom, a new beginning and another life. His unusual foreign words, exaggerated details, invented words and strange ideas make his writings interesting and different from anything else.

No one looked at his poems for a long time, although they gave a lot of attention to the writings of another patient: Ernst Herbeck. Individual texts by Mach began to be published in 1976. In the beginning, he used the names “Otto” or “Aloisius Schnedel” instead of his real name.

His first book was published in 1982. It was called “Letters Florence.”

Mach was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1929. He studied history and English after the Second World War. But he never finished his studies. Mach came to Gugging in the late 1950s. 
He began writing after he met Leo Navratil. In 1984, he moved into the “House of Artists” in Gugging. He fulfilled his greatest dream when he travelled to America in 1996. He also died there, in New York, shortly after his 67th birthday.

Ernst Herbeck (1920–1991) is the most famous poet among the Gugging Artists. His writings possess an unconventional inner logic. This logic is mysterious and humorous, and it makes us feel strong emotions. Many poems seem like little pieces of dreams. They are full of images, sudden shifts and unexpected turns. They demand that we leave our normal ways of thinking behind. Herbeck was born with a speech impediment that prevented him from speaking clearly. He called his mouth his “disqualified mouth,” and he found his voice in writing.
His first book of poems was published in 1966. Its title is “Schizophrenia and Language,” and it includes 83 poems. He did not use his own name: he called himself “Alexander.” Many people who read the book immediately saw the power of his language. In 1978, he became a member of the Graz Authors’ Assembly. Writers like Gerhard Roth and W.G. Sebald visited him in Gugging. Herbeck is still a part of Austrian literature today.

Herbeck did not just write: he also drew pictures. Most of his drawings are the size of postcards and show objects or animals. He created them in the 1970s.

A pareidolia is something we see in our brain. We think we recognize familiar objects or living things. For example, we might think we see a person’s face in the bark of a tree.

The exhibition with the title “Pareidolias” was presented in 1970. It was a very important exhibition in the history of Gugging art, especially the prints made there. You do not make a print by drawing or painting, you make it by using different printing processes.

The patients in Gugging started making etchings in 1968. You make an etching by scratching forms and lines into a surface. These are what you will see when the print is finished. The artist Peter Pongratz helped the patients with the technical parts of this process. But he let the patients work freely as artists.

The prints made it possible for the patients to reproduce their artworks, and a portfolio of their prints was published in 1969.

The Galerie St. Stephan in Vienna showed these etchings for the first time in 1970. The name of the exhibition was “Pareidolias.” The exhibition was shown from September 29 to October 25, 1970. It was later presented in the town of Solbad Hall in the Austrian state of Tyrol.

You could see 84 artworks by 14 Artists from Gugging at the exhibition. It was the first time that the artists used their real names. Leo Navratil thought that this was very important. He believed it was a sign that the patients were being socially rehabilitated, made able to participate in society again.

The artworks’ prices were not too high, and the exhibition was professional. That is why it became a great success and they sold around 500 etchings. Vienna’s “Albertina” museum even bought a few artworks.

Etchings are still an important artistic medium in Gugging. The association of  gugging friends and the galerie gugging regularly publish new etchings in cooperation with the artists.

Jürgen Tauscher mostly drew with pencil and colored pencils. He only rarely worked with crayons or acrylic paint. His art is centered around technological objects, especially flying objects.

These include helicopters, airplanes, military jets, blimps and the spaceship “Enterprise” from the television show “Star Trek.” Most of the objects are in the middle of the picture. Sometimes he draws technical details, which he either shows clearly or only suggests.

Tauscher also shows motorcycles, ships and very simplified architectural forms in his artworks. He often drawsmore than one object in a picture. Then he focuses on technical details or draws maps into the picture. These maps show how the objects are connected with the image. He uses writing in some pictures.

He draws their letters by looking at an existing text. Tauscher works like a technician. He draws his artworks step by step. He works from the inside out. He often draws over details that can no longer be seen when he is finished. He also does this in his three-dimensional objects.Many of his ideas come from books about airplanes and other vehicles.

Tauscher was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1974. He lived in Klosterneuburg, Austria, for a short time. That is where his artistic talent was discovered. He often visited the atelier gugging, and then he moved into the “House of Artists” in 2012

Karl Vondal’s art is centered around erotic fantasies. He is the director,and he designs the scenes.He makes his collages by gluing together pieces of paper and images cut out of his own drawings.

Most of Vondal’s artworks are a mix of image and writing. He adds the writing into the image. The main scene is at the center of the picture. Thereare smaller imagesand texts aroundit. You can find lots of symbols in his works, such as flowers and hearts.

Prince Karl is the artist’s alter ego, the way he imagines himself.

He appears again and again in the artworks, and he represents experiences from Vondal’s life. But Vondal adds to these experiences and expands on them. Prince Karl is a lover, husband, engineerand many other things. He is in a romantic relationship with the

so-called “Sexbompe” (“Sex Bomb”). The “Sexbompe” is a woman with large breasts and long, blond hair: she is a stereotype.

However, the “Sexbompe” is a youngvirgin who has never had sex before but is pregnant. You can read this in the texts inside the pictures. These writings represent another theme behind the images: the artist’s desires.

Vondal was born in Obersiebenbrunn, Austria, in 1953. His artistic talent was discovered in the 1980s. He moved into the “House of Artists” in 2002, which is when he began working at the  atelier gugging. He died in the “House of Artists” in 2024.

Franz Artenjak lived in a world of very mystical ideas. They were the starting point for the way he understood the world. He created his own cosmology. It was connected with his spiritual insights and his own teachings about the migration of souls. He wrote about these things in his letters. He described his inspired ideas as moments of “seeing clearly.” He could not explain where they came from.

Artenjak was very interested in astrology and developed a complex cosmological model. He believed that our solar system is made up of 15 solar systems. Five of them are “veiled” and exist as a hidden level of existence. He also talked about eternal life as a long process of waking up. Numbers also played a very important role in his ideas. Zero was especially important, and he saw it as the highest number. His drawings often make us think of maps or star charts. Text and image are closely connected. He used pencil and colored pencils to draw dense pictures with lots of details. They seem like maps of an inner world.

Artenjak was born in South Tyrol, Italy, in 1920. His artworks were included in exhibitions of the Gugging Artists between 1970 and 1983. He died in Gugging in the year 1985.

In 2026, August Walla (1936–2001) would have turned 90 years old. We are showing some of his many artworks to celebrate this anniversary. When Walla’s grandmother died, he became very afraid that his mother would also die. He drew his fear of death in his pictures. The Christian path to an eternity after death was very important for Walla because everyone who dies enters this eternity. For him, there was also the “End-of-Eternity.” That means something new that comes after eternity. The end of eternity played a big role in his artworks. The words “End-of-Eternity” and “End-of-the-Universe” often appear in his pictures. Walla created his own mythological universe for himself: “End-of-Eternities-Land.” It has its own language and many worlds of gods.

The “Eternity God Sattus”protects people. Walla hoped that his friendship with Sattus would protect him from the god of death.

Walla saw his gender in different ways. He was a “Nazi girl” during the Nazi period. An operation turned him into a “Communist double boy” during the Russian occupation. In his pictures, he used political symbols for this sex change. For example, the left-facing swastika represents femininity. The hammer and sickle stand for masculinity.

Walla was born in Klosterneuburg, Austria, on June 22, 1936. 
He grew up with his mother Aloisia and his grandmother Rosina. Walla and his mother lived in different apartments in Klosterneuburg until1983. That is where he painted his first artworks. They moved into the “House of Artists” in Gugging in 1983. He filled the walls of his room up to the ceiling with painted figures, writings and symbols. Walla died in 2001.

In 2026, Johann Hauser (1926–1996) would have turned 100 years old. For this reason, we pay tribute to his artistic oeuvre. Hauser began drawing in the late 1950s. His doctor Leo Navratil and another patient named Aurel Iselstöger made him want to draw. Iseltöger’s pictures of airplanes influenced him especially strongly.

You can already see Hauser’s personal subjects and style in his early artworks. He never stopped refining and shaping them. He mostly drew on paper with pencil and colored pencils.His lines are very bold, powerful and densely packed.

Nude women were a very important subjectfor him. He drew their secondary sexual characteristics, such as their breasts and pubic hair, in a very dominant way. Military airplanes, tanks and emergency vehicles were also important subjects for him.

These came from his experiences in the Second World War.

You can find some motifs again and again in his pictures, such as rectangles, sun, moon, heart and star.There is a “Hauser Star” that has four points and is painted in the shade of blue called Prussian blue. This star is an important symbol in Hauser’s work, and it also became the symbol of the “House of Artists.”

Hauser was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1926. He came to the mental hospital in Gugging in 1949. He moved into the “House of Artists” in 1981 and died there in 1996.

Manuel Griebler’s artworks are very dense. They contain layers of memories, thoughts and inner images. You need to focus, take time and get up close to the drawings to really look at them. In the beginning, you will feel like thereis too much in them.After taking a longer look, you will recognize that Griebler has carefully used lines, forms and repetition to build everything up. The subjects of the pictures are familiar and fantastic. Griebler surrounds them with a huge number of little heads. He weaves the many lines together and they turn into dense patterns.

When he began making art, Griebler used pencil and oil pastels to draw faces all over the whole piece of paper. These pictures’lines are wild and have many layers. Then he decided to only work with colored pencils.He draws with very bright colors and presses very hard on the paper. This creates a dense surface that seems more like an object than a flat piece of paper. Every line is drawn with purpose: nothing is accidental.

Griebler was born in Kirchdorf, Austria, in 1991.He has lived in the “House of Artists” and worked at the atelier gugging since 2016.

Erich Tressler’s work is centered around creatures that look like dragons. They have wide-open mouths and sharp teeth. Their bodies are massive, threatening and fascinating.

The creatures are simplified but full of fantasy. The bodies have odd forms and are made up of shapes filled with different colors. Tressler adds these colors in a series of layers that are drawn on top of each other, and this produces a very lively texture.

Tressler was already fascinated by dragons as a child.

The television show “Grisu, the Little Dragon” is especially important to him. You can still see this memory in his pictures today, and it still motivates his work. Every one of Tressler’s dragons is different from the rest and has its own character.

He begins by drawing an outline in pencil. When he is satisfied with its form, he fills it in with colored pencils and crayons. These drawings’ dense and bold colors make them seem like paintings. The simplification and the figures come together to produce a lot of tension.

Tressler was born in Lower Austria in 1982. He has lived in the “House of Artists” and worked at the atelier gugging since 2010.

The series Stickstoff consists of two parts. The person surrenders control in both parts. At the beginning, there is a word or half of a sentence. It arrives by chance from everyday life, for example, from the television or conversations. The subconscious makes it into a complete sentence. The person does not think about it. The sentence sounds familiar, but it is strange. These sentences are embroidered on old textiles with a sewing machine. The machine works imprecisely. It causes flaws and knots. This is not planned either. In this way, art is created without firm control. You see what happens on its own. That shows a part of us as people.

Tex Rubinowitz was born in Hannover in 1961. He has lived in Vienna since 1984, and he draws cartoons for different newspapers and magazines. He also writes texts, for example, about art and music. And he writes novels. He works as an artist, too. His artworks have already been shown at many exhibitions in places like Vienna, Hamburg, Leipzig and Hadersdorf.