Illustration

Visual Art by mentally ill people – Dr. Thomas Röske / Heidelberg

Date: Tuesday,  June 6th 2006, 7 pm
Place: Lecture Room of Landesmuseum

Madness is an important topic in German expressionism – as a counter-image to the hated world of the bourgeois. Painters and graphic artists of this direction repeatedly depicted the mentally ill, in portraits, as symbols and as figures of identification between 1905 and 1935. Additionally the discovered the artistic works of institutionalised patients during this time. The aesthetics in Hans Prinzhorns book “Pictures of the Mentally Ill” (published in 1922) also have their roots in expressionism.

About the person:

Dr. phil Thomas Röske (born 1962) has been head of the Prinzhorn collection of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg since 2002. He studied history of art, science of music and psychology in Hamburg and obtained his doctorate in 1991 with a piece of work about Hans Prinzhorn (which appeared as a book under the title “The Doctor as Artist. Aesthetics and psychotherapy of Hans Prinzhorn 1886-1933” in 1995). He was a scientific college assistant at the History of Art Institute  at the University of Frankfurt from 1993 to 1999, from 1996 to 1999 the substitute speaker for the Graduate College “Psychological Energies of Visual Art” there. On the side he repeatedly worked as a freelance exhibition curator for different institutions (last: “Expressionism and Madness”, Schloß Gottorf, Schleswig 2003/2004).



Illsutration