Sammlung Prinzhorn

The Prinzhorn Collection shows works created by patients of psychiatric institutions.

The Prinzhorn Collection preserves a globally unique collection of works created by patients of psychiatric institutions at the turn of the 20th century. The works were collected by Hans Prinzhorn, physician and art historian, from 1919 to 1921. The Prinzhorn Collection comprises around 5000 works, mostly pencil or coloured pencil drawings as well as paintings with watercolours or oil, textiles and wooden sculptures.
435 patients/artists, including 80 women, are represented in the collection. Most of them were hospitalized in institutions in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, mostly with the diagnosis of "schizophrenia". The works reflect different social backgrounds and education of their authors. They reveal – often in fragmented or alienated form – contemporary history and its ideologies, but also individual life before the illness and the deforming internment of institutions.
Only a few patients had a professional artistic education. Often, however, they had come into contact with design practice through school or vocational training and activities in arts and crafts, architecture, crafts or technical professions. The handling of this 'prior knowledge' is different and ranges from the careful reproduction of what has been learned to the free variation or complete detachment of it. A smaller but significant part of the collection captivates through the use of idiosyncratic artistic means and unusual but coherent formal solutions that have a meaning of their own. They belong to the narrower field of art.

Permanent exhibition "The Prinzhorn Collection - from 'Lunatic Art' to Outsider Art"
For the first time, the Prinzhorn Collection Museum is showing a permanent exhibition in addition to the special exhibitions. Under the title "The Prinzhorn Collection – From "Lunatic Art" to Outsider Art", around 120 works from a psychiatric context from the middle of the 19th century to the present day provide a small insight into the 27,000-strong collection.

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday - Sunday: 11.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m.
Wednesday: 11.00 a.m. - 8.00 p.m.
Public holidays: 11.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m.

Prinzhorn Collection
Voßstraße 2
69115 Heidelberg