“And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”
 (William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, Scene 7) Round four hundred years ago, in Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘dementia’ did not yet exist, but the problem of the illness probably did. Today, there is a name for the condition of “not being of sound mind”, and a growing awareness of the significance of this illness for our ageing society. This was occasion for the Draiflessen Collection to present the foyer exhibition Kunst trotz(t) Demenz (Art Defies Dementia), which did a wonderful job of addressing this topic. In it not only well-known artists such as Jörg Immendorf, Felix Droese or Tatsumi Orimoto presented their artistic realizations relating to the topic; individuals affected by dementia also showed their artistic view of the world. “The heart doesn’t get dementia” (Udo Baer) – this sentence is reflected in the life-affirming joy that is perceptible, for example, in the works of Eberhard Warn, Herbert Zang and Christian Zimmermann, which, with their strong expressive means, present a quite different picture of dementia as an illness.