Women of Art Brut Take Over Vienna's Bank Austria Kunstforum

The exhibition 'Flying High: Women Artists of Art Brut' at Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, running until June 23, 2019, showcases over 5,000 works from the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic collection, of which only 20% are by women. Curators Ingried Brugger and Hannah Rieger chose not to display biographies alongside works, instead providing a booklet. The show opens with a 14-meter piece by Aloïse Corbaz and includes works by Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Julia Krause-Harder, Judith Scott, Madge Gill, Mary T. Smith, Marilena Pelosi, and Guo Fengy. It draws from the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and the L'Aracine collection in Lille. The term Art Brut, coined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945, is reinterpreted by Rieger as related to his wine merchant background. The exhibition also highlights the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic in Austria, where few women had access to studios, and the pioneering work of psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler, who first defined a patient as an artist in his 1921 book on Adolf Wölfli, later shown at Documenta 5 by Harald Szeemann.