Extraordinary - Unknown Works from Swiss Psychiatric Institutions around 1900

Extraordinary!: Unknown Works from Swiss Psychiatric Institutions around 1900. edited by Helen Hirsch, Katrin Luchsinger, and Thomas Röske / ISBN 9783858816047 / 320-page hardback, 6.75 x 9.5 inches, text in English and German, published by Scheidegger and Spiess (Switzerland)

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Extraordinary! presents the results of an exceptional research project undertaken at the Zurich University of the Arts that documented and examined art produced in asylums and mental hospitals throughout Switzerland around 1900. Varied in style and media, the works often mark long periods of dedicated and passionate work and reveal remarkable technical and artistic prowess. They serve, the editors show, as both an expression of their creators’ ideas and an act of compensation for—and a criticism of—the dull and often hard life at the institutions they trod.

Featuring a diverse selection of previously unpublished works, Extraordinary! questions our contemporary understanding of art, encouraging the reader to engage with these artists and their work and thereby revisit the very idea of what constitutes art.