“A Dream of a Ball Gown” Works from the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel

Following the presentation at the UPK Basel (December 2024 to March 2025), the exhibition can now be seen at the open art museum, the center for Swiss Outsider Art, Art Brut and Naive Art - supplemented by additional works that deepen the insight into the collection. The aim is also to open up new perspectives on healing art and creative ways of promoting mental health.

Most of the works from the UPK Basel picture collection were created by patients on site between 1960 and 1990. On the one hand, they reflect society and the understanding of psychiatry and mental health at the time. On the other hand, they are direct testimonies to an individual and often intensive examination of personal life motifs and the constant struggle for the right form and the right material. The works tell of the search for stability, for meaning - and of the approach to what is, as well as to what is lost or hidden and longed for. The works on display act as social seismographs. They reflect the perception of the world at different times in a personal, direct way. Many of the works open up a view of everyday life in the clinic, an everyday life that the patients spent largely cut off from the outside world. The works are created out of a deeply felt urgency. In the process of exploring a creative self, the self shapes, develops and recognizes itself at the same time. Many works are signed, some are titled and interpreted for the imagined public. The patients seek publicity and self-confidently mark their authorship. They make this claim to an artistic identity even when they are not artistically trained.

Works by the actress and draughtswoman Béatrice (Bea) Schweizer (1936-2013) are also preserved in the UPK Basel's picture archive. Her artistic oeuvre comprises around 600 pictures, both small and large-format, and is the largest in the UPK collection. It is also an idiosyncratic oeuvre in terms of form and content. It is versatile and demonstrates her skills. It stands to reason that Béatrice Schweizer may have undergone artistic training. One group of works is at the center of the exhibition: delicate drawings in black ink on register paper for EEG diagrams. Béatrice Schweizer uses the course of the nervous curves of the measured electrical activity of the brain with their various jagged deflections. She follows the curves, moving rapidly beyond them, condensing her strokes into blackened areas from which figures develop. Her work is dominated by demonic motifs. In the drawings, they appear as if inscribed in the diagram, as if they were flowing out of her own brainwaves and taking shape on the paper. We can only speculate about the inner demons with which Béatrice Schweizer battled.

Concepts of health and illness are subject to social change, scientific findings, political negotiations of norm and deviation as well as our understanding of concepts of life - which are currently being heavily negotiated again. The supporting program for the exhibition is therefore not geared towards a deficient concept of illness. The focus is on mental health. The aim is also to open up new perspectives on healing art and creative ways of promoting mental health.