![]() Höger points out that these works may be compared to the abstract images of the Gugging artist Anton Dobay (1906–1986). Höger notes in the exhibition’s catalog that, in his later works, Schöpke “drew figures and then colored in large areas in colored pencil or crayon on top of them,” sometimes producing “large-format works suggestive of very different moods and displaying painterly qualities,” with expanses of luminous hues that spread out and overlap. Color creeps into his drawings of the 1980s, when he added colored pencils to his use of plain pencils to shade a whale’s big body or lend a more vivid sense of volume to a standing figure’s luxuriant outpouring of hair, hair, hair. Schöpke sometimes drew large animals, including seals and whales, whose bulbous forms he surrounded with concentric lines or shaded areas as if to accentuate them. His simultaneously naked and see-through subjects’ corporeal details include genitalia and, in one drawing of a pregnant woman, the baby she is carrying in her womb, which appears as a kind of cage. These long ribbons of teeth are both comical and monstrous, resembling the ominous-looking bullet belts of soldiers and terrorists. Philipp Schöpke, “Ohne Titel (Untitled)” (1991), pencil and colored pencils on paper, 17.3 x 24.6 inches, private collection (© Art Brut KG, photo courtesy Museum Gugging)īy the 1980s, Schöpke had developed his signature style of depicting human subjects - with mounds of fluffy, wiry hair and broad mouths filled with spiky teeth. He was 35 years old, and it became his home until the end of his life. In and out of psychiatric hospitals, and rejected by his father, a locomotive-factory worker and Nazi sympathizer, Schöpke returned to the psychiatric hospital at Gugging for good in 1956. ![]() ![]() (The current arts center has nothing to do with such a hospital anymore.) Remarkably, he did another short stint in the military, only to be dismissed again. In time, Schöpke was sent for various stays to the Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging, the former, now-defunct psychiatric hospital out of which today’s Gugging arts complex evolved. Had he been bullied while serving as a soldier? In early 1941, he was drafted into the German military, only to soon be sent back home to recover from a mysterious head injury. In 1939, after the Nazis’ annexation of Austria into Germany and following the start of World War II, Schöpke, who, as a teenager, had worked as a farmhand, became a mold-making apprentice at a foundry. Regarded as awkward and inept, as a young boy he was teased by other children and chided by his father. The first of his parents’ three children, Schöpke was born in 1921 in a small town in Lower Austria, a large state in the northeastern part of the country. But if you look closely, you’ll see how inventive and sophisticated they are.”įeilacher, who arrived at Gugging in the 1980s and knew the artist well, notes that, after long periods of apparent inactivity or after an outing with his peers from the arts complex’s communal residence, during which he could appear completely detached, Schöpke would suddenly spring into action and enthusiastically recount every detail of a group trip or launch into an energetic art-making session. Organized by Museum Gugging’s director, Johann Feilacher, and Maria Höger, a young, German-born art historian, who, in recent years, has served on the museum’s research and curatorial team, philipp schöpke.! traces the evolution of its subject’s distinctive draftsmanship and presents an analysis of his art’s themes and technical character.ĭuring a recent walk-through of the exhibition, Höger observed, “One of the reasons why Schöpke might have been overshadowed by such Gugging artists as August Walla, with his big, colorful paintings, or Johann Hauser, with his bold images of women, is that, frankly, Schöpke’s works often have been regarded as ‘difficult’ - and to some viewers, even a bit scary. This revealing exhibition may raise it considerably. As much as the term “the artists of Gugging,” alluding to the arts complex’s residence program, which has become synonymous locally with definitive forms of self-taught and marginalized art, even among his Gugging peers, Schöpke has long held a lower profile. On view through March 10, the exhibition probes the development of one of the more intriguing - but still less well-known - bodies of work in the world of art brut. ![]() Martin Vukovits, “Portrait of Philipp Schöpke” (1986) (image courtesy Museum Gugging)
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