Ovartaci's work
Sixty years of painting and sculpture by one patient โ the centre of the collection.
Nils Jepsen /user:Nico โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Fanny Selmer (died before november 1911, se http://ovartaci.dk/artikler/pdf/Helikopter%20dec%2007.pdf ) โ Public domain ยท Nico Jepsen from Beder, Denmark โ CC BY-SA 2.0 ยท Nils Jepsen /user Nico โ CC BY-SA 3.0
Mostly no. The historical section presents old psychiatric treatment, its instruments and practices frankly, and some of the material is disturbing for adults. With children, consider the ARoS art museum or the Den Gamle By open-air museum instead.
Because it holds two things that rarely go together: a genuinely strong art collection, and a context explaining who made it and why. Ovartaci's work is shown as art rather than as a medical document, and that respect for its maker changes how you see the whole place.
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A museum combining the history of psychiatry with the art made by asylum patients, in a former psychiatric hospital building north of Aarhus. Its name comes from Louis Marcussen, known as Ovartaci, who spent some sixty years in this hospital and painted and sculpted throughout. His work is the centre of the collection and belongs to what is called outsider art โ work made by people entirely outside the institutional art system. The museum's other side is historical and difficult: instruments, beds and records from two centuries of psychiatric treatment, including practices regarded at the time as medicine that look brutal today. The museum does not soften that part. That makes it among Denmark's most distinctive and least comfortable museums at the same time. It is not a light visit and does not suit every visitor, but it stays with you. It lies outside central Aarhus and needs a bus or tram, so count it as a half day including travel.
Sixty years of painting and sculpture by one patient โ the centre of the collection.
Work made by people entirely outside the institutional art system.
The museum shows old psychiatric practice as it was.
Risskov, north of Aarhus