Von Kirchner bis heute (From Kirchner To Today)

Prinzhorn Collection Museum and elsewhere, Heidelberg, Germany. Until 14 August.

During 1919–21, in a psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg, Germany, the young psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn collected more than 5,000 works of art created by about 400 patients. Forgotten for more than 50 years after being condemned as 'degenerate art' during the Nazi regime, the collection was catalogued in the 1980s and housed in a museum in the clinic in 2001.

This year the Prinzhorn Collection Museum celebrates its tenth anniversary, and the 125th anniversary of Prinzhorn's birth, with an exhibition. A selection of original pieces from the collection are paired with works by modern artists who have drawn inspiration from them — including Paul Klee, Ernst L. Kirchner and Max Ernst.

The responses comment on the creativity of the patients, the psychiatric establishment itself and past understandings of mental pathology. Some of the reactions do not quite compete with the authenticity of the original works; others are compelling and eloquent.

Drawings and an installation by contemporary artist Peter Riek revive the story of farmer Barbara Suckfüll, who, at the age of 50, started to hear voices. In 1910, under their command, she began to draw outlines of dishes and cutlery. Writing along and in between the outlines, Suckfüll captures in words her everyday life in the Heidelberg asylum: what she thought, did or ate, her rows with the nurses and what the voices told her. Every word is followed by a full stop, resulting in a dense net of marks that dissolves into abstraction.

Barbara Suckfüll's 1910 ink drawing incorporates words describing her life as a psychiatric patient. Credit: B. SUCKFÜLL OHNE TITEL (1910)/SAMMLUNG PRINZHORN

Also on show is a thoughtful series of drawings by Dorothee Rocke, one of the first artists to explore the collection when the museum opened in 2001. She dedicates her work to a 1912 sketch by inmate Hyacinth Freiherr von Wieser, in which an uncertainly outlined face blends into a landscape annotated like a map. Rocke's drawings dismember the image and evolve into forms that recall elements of asylum life, such as the cells in which patients were held.

Prinzhorn saw the creations of the mentally ill, who were uninfluenced by shifting trends in the art world, as a raw depiction of an individual's condition and a valuable way to externalize the psyche to the outer world. The exhibition is not an enquiry into the origins of mental disorders, but into their lived experience. Noticeable among the contemporary works is the absence of any reference to the brain.

At a time when psychiatry is undergoing huge change — the genetic revision of diagnoses, the search for biological markers and the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging — this exhibition reminds us of the irreplaceable ability of personal narratives to enter the depths of the mind through doors that are not open to biological analysis.