Katharina

Katharina (circa 1910-?) was born into a bourgeois environment in Austria. After completing her business studies she worked in a textile factory and eventually married the managing director. She had three children and helped her husband run the company. When she was around fifty, in the early 1960s, she suddenly changed her point of view: losing all interest in her family, Katharina withdrew into herself and in the end was committed to a psychiatric institution. While there she experienced alternating periods of calm and of hyperactivity, during which she would draw, only to destroy her work immediately afterwards.

The only works to have survived are those that doctors were able to pry from her at the last moment. Drawn mostly on wrapping paper, these large pictures depict imaginary anatomical constructions, in which snippets of psychology, physiology, and philosophy all intermingle.