Giant=Creation. The World of Adolf Wölfli

Those notebooks will for the first be shown in their entirety. The comprehensive presentation is complemented by a selection of his early pencil drawings as well as documentary material from the artist’s everyday life at the institution. The exhibition reveals the conditions under which Wölfli’s work was created and shows how he worked as an artist.

100 years ago it would have been a bold statement to call Adolf Wölfli an artist. But the psychiatrist and M.D. Walter Morgenthaler dared to do just that in the first monograph "Madness and Art. The Life and Work of Adolf Wölfli" dedicated to the Waldau patient, and his doing so, in 1921, was a challenge to both psychiatry and art. Today, Wölfli’s extraordinary work enjoys wide recognition worldwide.
Wölfli, on the other hand, had long been aware of such status. He discovered art at the age of 35, in the Waldau Psychiatric Sanatorium in Bern. There, as a draftsman, composer, and writer, he created a vast oeuvre until his death in 1930, a universe encompassing over 25 000 pages – the “St. Adolf-Giant-Creation,” as he himself described it. His body of work is unique within 20th century art.
The fact that Wölfli was to ever pursue an artistic career was by no means assured considering his origins. Wölfli was born into poverty. He was hired out as a “lot boy,” later serving as a day labourer in various jobs, but was then sent to prison for child abuse and transferred to Waldau, in 1895, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Despite a lack of education, he was still able, as an autodidact, to create a body of work that continues to fascinate in its visionary visual power.

Wölfli himself regarded the literary oeuvre to be his major endeavour. He worked on it with just a few interruptions from 1908 until his death in 1930. He produced an idealized biography in which he and his followers travelled through the countries and continents of imagined worlds. They are, as such, fantastic journeys of the mind that range as far as outer space and stand in remarkable contrast to his custody in Waldau. In an act of self-empowerment, he was able to reinvent the circumstances of his own life.
Wölfli’s writings are bound in elaborate folios interspersed with sound pieces, poems, and illustrations. The exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee, which has been organized in collaboration with the Adolf Wölfli-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern, adheres to the artist’s own preferences, focusing in the presentation on pieces selected from the books for the first time. As a result, the drawings are conveyed within the context of his writing. The exhibition is offering a remarkable opportunity to encounter this extraordinary body of work anew.
His oeuvre developed from within the dark depths of Wölfli’s own existence. Through art, but on the fragments of a problematic life, he managed to create a body of work of great poetic power that continues to touch us to this day. The exhibition makes a statement in support of the nonconformist and extraordinary, which is to be even more rarely found in an increasingly standardized world.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Adolf Wölfli Foundation.

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