Karoline Rosskopf was among the first documented artists in Gugging, but it has been difficult to verify much about her biography. What is certain is that, between 1965 and 1966, she was residing in what was then the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging.” In this institution, which was divided by gender, her drawing talent stirred her psychiatrist Erna Navratil’s interest, who presented the drawings to her husband, Leo Navratil.

Rosskopf’s known oeuvre is limited in scope and focused on depictions of people: individual images that fill the sheet or a grid-like arrangement of her Headfooters. Her mostly genderless beings – assembled out of geometrical forms and provided with distinctively stylized hair, fingers and toes – present an abstract reduction of the human form. The artist’s documented works are all concentrated pencil drawings on 15 x 10 cm sheets of paper. This format was of historical significance for the development of the art brut center gugging: Leo Navratil introduced it in 1954 for drawing tests serving diagnostic purposes. This practice was inspired, among other things, by a publication of the Russian-American psychiatrist Karen Machover. The additions (name, date and gender symbol) seen on some drawings were put there by someone other than the artist and allude to this historical context.