Oswald Tschirtner

1920-2007 · Perchtoldsdorf, Austria

How much can you leave out and still have a person? Oswald Tschirtner spent half a century finding out, one spare ink line at a time.

The life

Tschirtner was born in Perchtoldsdorf, Austria in 1920, entered a seminary at ten, and was drafted into the German army, fighting at Stalingrad and ending the war in a French prison camp. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was hospitalised after the war and came in the 1950s under the care of psychiatrist Leo Navratil at Gugging, near Vienna. When the House of Artists opened on the hospital grounds in 1981 he moved in, living and drawing there among the Gugging artists until his death in 2007.

The work

Ink on paper, from postcard size to sheets metres tall: human figures, objects and landscapes reduced to the fewest possible lines, a graphic shorthand scholars have linked to his quiet, humble spirituality. His work is held by MoMA in New York, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo.

Why we love them

The most economical draughtsman in art brut. Two lines, one soul.

Go deeper

• Oswald Tschirtner at the Outsider Art Fair
• Oswald Tschirtner on Wikipedia
• 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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