Exhibition: “The Other Shore of the Avant-Garde”

For a long time, paintings, sculptures, and embroideries by patients in psychiatric clinics were regarded primarily as material for medical study. The exhibition “The Other Shore of the Avant-Garde”, on view from 24 September to 10 January 2027 at the Sala Recoletos de la Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, explores how these works captured the interest of artists and influenced their search for new forms.

In the early twentieth century, psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn assembled a collection in Heidelberg of works by people admitted to psychiatric institutions. His book, published in 1922, contributed to the recognition of the artistic value of these creations. Expressionists, Dadaists, and Surrealists were drawn to the freedom with which their creators explored forms, outside academic conventions.

Curator Pilar Soler will set the works from the Prinzhorn collection in dialogue with those of avant-garde artists to trace the history of this interest. This relationship also went through a dark period: in the 1930s, the Nazi regime used such comparisons to discredit modern art. After the Second World War, Jean Dubuffet took up Prinzhorn’s legacy, championed the value of creation outside the official art world, and formulated the concept of art brut.

The exhibition invites visitors to examine both the works themselves and the changing ways they have been perceived. Why does one work end up in a medical archive and another in a museum? Here, this question accompanies specific drawings and objects whose stories could have been very different.