Hannes Gruber’s 2017 publication Patient consists of ten postcards featuring watercolor illustrations of hospital beds, along with a short, staple bound booklet collecting texts on Gruber’s work, and a folded leaflet. The leaflet features screenshots of search results for the Instagram hashtags under which Gruber uploaded his drawings—including #hospitalbed, #contemporaryart #blue, #gold, #goldenbed, #healing—centering these illustrations in visual discourses of sickness, health care, and art.
Gruber’s illustrations are done in pastel colors, with soft lines and half-erased sketch marks, serving to soften and to humanize these otherwise cold or sterile objects. The booklet contains several essays in German and one in English by Alison Hugill, who discusses Guber’s hospital beds in the context of healing industry marketing, depersonalization, and futuristic technological development. The different elements that make up Patient are held together in a gray cardboard sleeve, folded and held together with a rubber band.
