blug - 4 decades of art in gugging

The museum’s inaugural exhibition was called blug; the title was taken from a work by Franz Kernbeis. “Blug” means plow and is to be understood symbolically, in the sense that the field had been tilled in order to enable the new museum gugging.  This first exhibition was intended as a retrospective on the preceding decades.

Since the Seventies, those artists who have become well-known under the name Gugging Artists have counted among the essential representatives of Art Brut globally. Alongside the familiar ones—Johann Hauser, August Walla, Oswald Tschirtner—creators of art living at the time in the “House of Artists”, as well as several already deceased members, were represented.

Some of the 395 drawings, paintings, objects, and etchings originated from the Private Foundation – Artists from Gugging collection, but also from private lenders such as, for instance, the Helmut Zambo Collection and the State Collections of Lower Austria.

24 artists were represented: Josef Bachler, Josef Blahaut, Anton Dobay, Johann Fischer, Franz Gableck, Johann Garber, Johann Hauser, Rudolf Horacek, Franz Kamlander, Franz Kernbeis, Fritz Koller, Johann Korec, Rudolf Limberger, Fritz Opitz, Otto Prinz, Heinrich Reisenbauer, Johann Scheiböck, Arnold Schmidt, Philipp Schöpke, Günther Schützenhöfer, Oswald Tschirtner, Karl Vondal, August Walla, Erich Zittra.

A catalog of the same name was published to mark the exhibition.