Alfred Kubin was born in 1877 in Leitmeritz, Bohemia. He attended the Salzburg school of arts and crafts and studied at the Munich Academy. From 1906 onwards, Kubin lived and worked on his manor at Zwickledt Castle near Wernstein am Inn. His pain at his mother's early death and the despair and great hardship of his father plunged him into a tremendous depression. His 1908 novel, The Other Side, contains many hidden autobiographical elements. 

Kubin primarily worked as a draughtsman and illustrator. His art focused on the uncanny, the demonic, the grotesque and the fantastical, and he became known as the “Innviertel mystic”. 

The gallery display includes several of his lithographs and coloured pen drawings. A series of ten (of an original thirty) outline scenes for the play Rauhnacht can also be seen. Richard Billinger’s work was first performed in Munich in 1931 and was described as a “witches’ dance of erotic urges, culminating in a sex murder”. The play's incomparable atmosphere was captured by Kubin’s outline scenes. Alfred Kubin was the key member of the artists’ guild.

He died in Zwickledt in 1959.

Works by Ernst August von Mandelsloh, Herbert Fladerer and Jacques Ernst Sonderegger exhibited here are examples of artists from Kubin’s personal circle. The eleven woodcuts by the Swiss-born Sonderegger were donated to the Innviertel gallery by Alfred Kubin.