Schöpke spent decades creating an oeuvre centered around his occupation with the human figure. The artist’s early work was created at the beginning of the sixties. The human beings drawn by the artist are more than naked: their transparent bodies provide a view of their inner organs—oversized, symbolic depictions of hearts beat in a luminous red in the right half of their chests. Esophaguses, trachea, stomachs, and the twists of tripartite intestinal tracts are revealed. The bony joints of the arms and legs stand out, the rib cage is formed by its individual pairs of bones, and bunches of lines suggest curly pubic hair and sex organs. Schöpke assigns particular significance to the hair of the heads and to the teeth. These images are supplemented with writing in the form of information about the figures’ ages as well as labels like mothers and fathers or daughters and sons as well as specific first names, such as Mitzi. In addition to depictions of people, there are images of animals, plants, or airplanes. In a manner similar to his human figures, Schöpke reveals a view of the animals’ insides; fine lines surround their bodies like a kind of protective layer. His depiction of the world of flora presents flowers, trees, and sometimes hybrid, tree-like creatures. Schöpke utilized grid-like frameworks when constructing three-dimensional structures, such as houses. Beginning in the late eighties and in the nineties, color took on an increasingly important role in Philipp Schöpke’s work as an artist. He retained the subjects of his earlier pictures, depicting human figures or ghostlike hybrid creatures, and then drew over them with broad fields of colored pencil, wax crayon, or charcoal. Working in this way, he invested his sheets with a sense of spatial depth at some points. At times, this led to large-format works featuring atmospheric layers of color that extend into the realm of the nonobjective.

Philipp Schöpke was born on December 8, 1921, in the Lower Austrian town of Erlach. His first stay at the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging” took place in 1943. He lived there permanently from 1956 onward. In contrast to other Gugging Artists from the early period, Schöpke’s work first attracted public attention in the eighties. He moved into the “House of Artists” in 1981 and spent the rest of his life there, passing away in 1998. Schöpke labeled multiple sheets “Children’s House”—possibly a reference to the building within the complex of the Gugging institution where the museum gugging, galerie gugging, and atelier gugging are now located.