adolf wölfli. universe.!

Today, the Swiss Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) counts among the major artists of the 20th century. To mark his 150th birthday in 2014, the comprehensive retrospective adolf wölfli. universum.! at museum gugging showed how Wölfli created past and future anew: as a cosmos on paper, as a visionary reflection of the self, and as a magnificently distorted world in music, poetry, and prose.

From 1908 through 1930, Adolf Wölfli expanded his dramatic life story, penned for the first time in 1895, to an endless invention of the self. On more than 25,000 pages, he employed prose and poetry, music and compositions, numerals and drawings to transform his childhood into a voyage of discovery. Wölfli transformed his past as an orphan, humiliated drudge, penitentiary inmate, and patient of the psychiatric sanatorium at Waldau near Bern into a glorious future. Of this world blueprint, the “St. Adolf-Giant-Creation”, the French Surrealist André Breton said that it was one of the three or four most important works of the 20th century. Wölfli’s Creation was disseminated in museum gugging in drawing, text, film, and sound. Adolf Wölfli’s “Bread Art” was presented in the Novomatic Salon: single-sheet drawings that Wölfli gifted or sold to, or traded for drawing tools with, a growing circle of interested doctors, males nurses, and visitors from 1916 onward. 

The lender was the Adolf Wölfli Foundation of the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, whose director Daniel Baumann was the exhibition’s co-curator. The exhibition encompassed 47 works, some in large format.