Museum Gugging

Museum Gugging stands in Maria Gugging, a village within Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria. It occupies a former hospital building that once belonged to the Niederösterreichische Landesnervenklinik Ost. The clinic closed in 2007, leaving the site free for a new purpose. Johann Feilacher founded the museum and led it for sixteen years before Nina Ansperger took over in 2023. Together with the galerie gugging, the Haus der Künstler and the open atelier gugging, it forms the Art/Brut Center Gugging. The museum specialises in Art brut and presents works created on site by artists from Gugging. Its 1,300 square metres of space include 700 square metres for semi-permanent displays tracing the colony’s output from the 1950s to today. Founding figures such as Johann Hauser, Oswald Tschirtner and August Walla appear alongside contemporary artists like Laila Bachtiar and Karl Vondal. The collection draws from the Gugging Artists’ Private Foundation and loans from international museums. Visitors find semi-permanent rooms filled with drawings, paintings and objects by Gugging artists. Changing special exhibitions run alongside these displays, covering a wide range of themes. The museum’s titles use August Walla’s distinctive punctuation—a full stop followed by an exclamation mark—as a tribute to his unique style. Outside, the surrounding village preserves the quiet setting in which this remarkable art emerged.