Eugen Gabritschevsky

1893-1979 · Moscow, Russia

A brilliant Russian geneticist who studied mutation in the laboratory, then spent nearly fifty years in a Bavarian hospital painting mutations of his own.

The life

Gabritschevsky was born in Moscow in 1893 and completed a degree in biology at the University of Moscow in 1917, in the middle of the Revolution, specialising in genetics when the science was in its infancy. He researched at Columbia University in New York and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris before his mental health broke down, and from around 1929 he lived at the Eglfing-Haar psychiatric hospital near Munich for the rest of his life. Encouraged by his brother and his doctor, he painted prolifically for decades. Jean Dubuffet found his work in 1950 and brought it into the Collection de l’Art Brut, and in 2017 the American Folk Art Museum gave him a major retrospective.

The work

Thousands of gouaches and watercolours, often on old calendars and hospital forms, made with chance techniques like frottage and decalcomania. Coral-like patterns, fantastic hybrid creatures with huge heads and eyes, and ghostly faces conjured out of formless washes with a few carefully placed dots. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the abcd collection.

Why we love them

The scientist of heredity became the painter of metamorphosis. He never stopped studying how forms become other forms, he just changed instruments.

Go deeper

• Eugen Gabritschevsky at the Outsider Art Fair
• Eugen Gabritschevsky on Wikipedia
• American Folk Art Museum
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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