A Day with David Bowie: How a Visit to a Psychiatric Clinic Changed Him – and His Music | David Bowie

FFrom Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust, and a recluse in Berlin to late-career elegance, David Bowie’s oeuvre is defined by reinvention. As an artist, he was relentlessly attuned to the circumstances that might spark the next creative rupture. However, one crucial moment has slipped largely from the popular imagination: a day spent inside a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Vienna – a moment that was unexpectedly formative.

In September 1994, Bowie and Brian Eno – who had recently reunited to develop new music – accepted an invitation from Austrian artist Andre Heller to visit the Maria Gogging Psychiatric Clinic. Established on the site in 1981 as a combined home and studio, Haus der Künstler is known internationally as a center for Art Brut – or “outsider art” – produced by residents, many of whom suffer from schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

The visit was documented by the famous Austrian photographer Christine de Grancy, who photographed Bowie engaging with these so-called “outsider artists” – a term often criticized because it depicts artists through illness or marginality rather than authorship. For the first time, these intimate paintings will be shown in Australia, when A Day with David opens at the Joondalup Festival in Western Australia in March, in association with the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Through de Grancy’s lens, Bowie’s admiration for the artists is clear. He bends down, listens, draws, studies – directing his attention not toward the camera but toward the artists themselves.

“They paint without any sense of judgement,” Bowie told music journalist Gene Stout in a 1995 interview published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Whatever they feel is what they draw.”

The visit became the conceptual catalyst for 1. Outside, Bowie’s dense, unsettling 1995 album, whose fractured narratives and moral ambiguity were shaped in part by the ideas he encountered there.

Among the artists Bowie met that day, August Walla made a special impression. Walla’s works—full of symbols, inventive languages, and obsessive repetition—extended far beyond paper, covering the walls and facade of the Haus der Künstler. By contrast, Oswald Chertner, who lived in Gojing for decades, worked with radical restraint, producing spare pencil drawings in which the human figure was reduced to elongated lines.

“The amazing, somewhat cold atmosphere of the place is overwhelming,” Bowie told Stout. “You have to pass through a normal asylum before you get to their wing, which is completely covered in paint. They painted every nook and cranny, the walls, all the trees outside. They painted everything that was standing and still.”

When Bowie and Eno returned to the studio to make 1. Outside, they tried to emulate Gugging’s spontaneity and freedom. Bowie later recalled that the first thing they did was “get all the musicians together and have them redesign the studio”, transforming the rehearsal space into something closer to the painted walls at Gugging. “They were so involved in it that it was difficult to engage them in the music. What I did was give the whole thing a sense of play, which is part of true freedom of expression.”

The nibble itself carries a darker weight. Founded in the 19th century, the clinic was later incorporated into the Nazi Aktion T4 programme, which targeted people with mental and physical disabilities, and led to the mass murder of an estimated 250,000 people. In Gugging alone, hundreds of patients were killed or sent to extermination facilities.

This history—of institutional violence toward the mentally ill—paradoxically stands alongside the reinvention of Gojing as a haven for creativity. Bowie, whose family life was marked by mental illness, felt this tension acutely. Much of Bowie’s work was haunted by his half-brother Terry Burns, who lived with schizophrenia and died by suicide.

At Joondalup Contemporary Art Gallery, A Day with David will be revealed as more than just a traditional photography exhibition. Curated by Lisa Henderson, the exhibition will feature 28 black-and-white framed works by Christine de Grancy alongside large-scale photographic prints and a video component including vintage televisions stacked on inset pedestals, showing archival footage as part of the installation. The exhibition also includes a large-scale recreation of August Walla’s Painted Room, where his icons cover the walls from floor to ceiling.

Sadly, Christine De Grancy passed away on March 20, 2025, just weeks before “A Day with David” opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. After remaining in her archives for nearly three decades, it was not until the end of her life that the images were brought together as a coherent body of work. What they offer, says Santa Monica Museum of Art general director Ricardo Puentes, is not celebrity or voyeurism, but proximity. “They feel very honest,” he says. “You don’t feel like you’re looking in. You’re invited into the space.”

Speaking in a video recorded for a 2023 exhibition at the Googling Museum, Christine de Grancy described Bowie as “a star – a global star – who was completely underrated. The kind of presence I don’t associate with stardom at all. He was very isolated, very committed.”

What the photos ultimately show, Puentes says, is not a star at all: “It’s not really about him being on top. It’s about him being open to other people’s experiences.”