{"id":370419,"date":"2026-01-15T01:30:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/370419\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T01:30:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:30:14","slug":"a-day-with-david-bowie-how-a-visit-to-a-psychiatric-clinic-changed-him-and-his-music-david-bowie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/370419\/","title":{"rendered":"A Day with David Bowie: how a visit to a psychiatric clinic changed him \u2013 and his music | David Bowie"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin recluse to the late-career elegist, David Bowie\u2019s oeuvre<\/a> is defined by reinvention. As an artist he was relentlessly attuned to the conditions that might provoke the next creative rupture. One defining moment, however, has largely slipped from the popular imagination: a day spent inside a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Vienna \u2013 one that would prove unexpectedly formative.<\/p>\n

In September 1994, Bowie and Brian Eno<\/a> \u2013 who had reunited to develop new music \u2013 accepted an invitation from the Austrian artist Andr\u00e9 Heller to visit the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic. The site\u2019s Haus der K\u00fcnstler, established in 1981 as a communal home and studio, is known internationally as a centre for Art Brut \u2013 or \u201cOutsider Art\u201d \u2013 produced by residents, many living with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.<\/p>\n

David Bowie at the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic in 1994. Photograph: Christine de Grancy<\/p>\n

The acclaimed Austrian photographer Christine de Grancy documented the visit, capturing Bowie engaging with these so-called \u201coutsider artists\u201d \u2013 a term often criticised for framing artists through illness or marginality rather than authorship. For the first time, these intimate portraits will be shown in Australia, when A Day with David opens at Joondalup festival in Western Australia<\/a> in March, in collaboration with Santa Monica Art Museum.<\/p>\n

Through de Grancy\u2019s lens, Bowie\u2019s admiration for the artists is palpable. He crouches, listens, sketches, studies \u2013 his attention directed not towards the camera but toward the artists themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey paint without any feeling of judgment,\u201d Bowie told the music journalist Gene Stout in a 1995 interview<\/a> published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. \u201cWhatever they feel is what they paint.\u201d<\/p>\n

The visit became a conceptual trigger for 1. Outside, Bowie\u2019s dense, unsettling 1995 album, whose fractured narratives and moral ambiguity were partly shaped by the ideas he encountered there.<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019ve painted every nook and crevice, the walls, all the trees outside,\u2019 Bowie said. August Walla\u2019s room at the Gugging clinic will be recreated at Joondalup festival. Photograph: Santa Monica Art Museum<\/p>\n

Among the artists Bowie met that day, August Walla made a particular impression. Walla\u2019s work \u2013 layered with symbols, invented languages and obsessive repetition \u2013 extended far beyond paper, covering the walls and facade of the Haus der K\u00fcnstler. By contrast, Oswald Tschirtner, who lived at Gugging for decades, worked with radical restraint, producing spare pencil drawings in which the human figure was reduced to elongated lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stunning, rather cold atmosphere of the place is overwhelming,\u201d Bowie told Stout. \u201cYou have to drive past the regular asylum before you get to their wing, which is completely covered in paint. They\u2019ve painted every nook and crevice, the walls, all the trees outside. Everything that\u2019s standing and still, they\u2019ve painted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artist August Walla at the door of his room, which had a particular effect on Bowie. Photograph: Martin Vukovits<\/p>\n

When Bowie and Eno returned to the studio to make 1. Outside, they tried to emulate Gugging\u2019s spontaneity and freedom. Bowie later recalled that the first thing they did was \u201cget all the musicians together and make them redecorate the studio\u201d, turning a rehearsal space into something more akin to the painted walls of Gugging. \u201cThey got into it so much that it was hard to get them into the music. What it did was give the whole thing a sense of play, which is a part of real freedom of expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gugging itself carries a darker weight. Founded in the 19th century, the clinic was later absorbed into the Nazi\u2019s Aktion T4 program, which targeted those with mental and physical disabilities, and resulted in the mass murder of an estimated 250,000 people. At Gugging alone, hundreds of patients were murdered or sent to extermination facilities.<\/p>\n

That history \u2013 of institutional violence towards the mentally ill \u2013 sits jarringly alongside Gugging\u2019s reinvention as a haven for creativity. Bowie, whose own family life had been marked by mental illness, would have felt that tension acutely. His half-brother, Terry Burns, who lived with schizophrenia and died by suicide, haunted much of Bowie\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

At Joondalup Contemporary Art<\/a> Gallery, A Day with David will unfold as more than a conventional photography exhibition. Curated by Lisa Henderson, it will feature 28 framed black-and-white works by De Grancy alongside large-format photographic prints and a video component comprising vintage televisions stacked on internal plinths, playing archival footage as part of the installation. The exhibition also includes a full-scale recreation of Walla\u2019s painted room, with his iconography covering the walls from floor to ceiling.<\/p>\n

Sadly, De Grancy died on 20 March 2025, just weeks before A Day with David opened at the Santa Monica Art Museum. After sitting in her archive for nearly three decades, the photographs were only brought together as a coherent body of work at the end of her life. What they offer, the general manager of the Santa Monica Art Museum, Ricardo Puentes, says is not celebrity or voyeurism, but proximity. \u201cThey feel very candid,\u201d he says. \u201cYou don\u2019t feel like you\u2019re looking in. You\u2019re invited into the space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patients at the clinic on the day De Grancy and Bowie visited. Photograph: Christine de Grancy<\/p>\n

Speaking in a video recorded for a 2023 exhibition at Museum Gugging, De Grancy described Bowie as \u201cthe star \u2013 the world star \u2013 who was so completely understated. That kind of presence is not something I associate with stardom at all. He was very withdrawn, extremely observant.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the photographs ultimately show, as Puentes puts it, is not a star at all: \u201cIt\u2019s really not about him being at the forefront. It\u2019s him being open to other people\u2019s experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin recluse to the late-career elegist, David Bowie\u2019s oeuvre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-370419","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}