Adolf Wölfli
“Clock researcher, poet, writer, draughtsman, composer, milker, gardener, fisherman, boatman, gravedigger and soldier of the Emmental Battalion” (A. W.)
May 1 to July 10, 2011
at the Old Town Hall
Ingelheim am Rhein
The orphaned indentured boy, farmhand and migrant worker Adolf Wölfli, born in Bowil, Emmental (Canton of Bern, Switzerland), spent the last 35 years of his life in the Waldau psychiatric hospital near Bern. There, until his death, he created a monumental, fascinating body of work comprising 25,000 pages—mostly large-format, bound into booklets—with drawings, notations, narrative texts, collages, poems, phonetic scripts and numerical compositions.
Like Jules Verne, Wölfli travelled the world in his mind and beyond, into the cosmos; like Karl May, he also wrote himself into a world that was familiar to him, that carried him away and brought him recognition. And yet Wölfli’s journey of the mind is different—it enables him to recreate his childhood and build a visionary, daring future. The outside world, which he virtually absorbs through atlases, travel books and illustrated magazines, serves him as a quarry for constructing his own enigmatic and imaginary reality.
The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, the Kunstmuseum Bern and private collections in Switzerland.
It presents the rich art of a poor man, a storyteller par excellence, who does not understand the world and therefore reinvents it: as a writer, draughtsman, poet and composer.
