«Adolf Wölfli Universe» A Retrospective

At the beginning 20th century, Adolf Wölfli reinvented his own life on over 25,000 pages. First of all in the form of a spectacular childhood, then in a glorious future that he entitled "St. Adolf Giant Creation". He transformed his past as an orphan and "discarded" child, an abused servant, menial, migrant worker, prison inmate and ultimately as a patient in the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic near Bern. It was there, in 1895, on the advice of his doctors that he wrote the first of his life stories which were to expand over the following decades to include prose and poetry, music and compositions, numbers and drawings to become an endless narrative.

Radical Design for a New World

After God's creation, the St. Adolf Giant Creation was the second. Down to the smallest detail Wölfli describes how in the  near future, thanks to infinite wealth, his nephew in real life, Rudolf, will buy the earth and the universe, urbanize and rename them. Wölfli himself becomes St. Adolf II and the focus of this creation. For the construction of St. Adolf Giant Creation, Wölfli quarries unashamedly from the outside world but substitutes the conventions and norms pertaining there with his own. Thus he has left us a highly personal work that at the same time is a unique reflection of our own world. Since his time, Wölfli's art has lost nothing of its radical nature, drama, humour and beauty. The exhibition Adolf Wölfli Universe presents in heretofore unseen abundance Wölfli's art and world design. There are not only pictures, texts and music but also a projection which gives an exemplary introduction to the 8,000-page Trauer-Marsch (Funeral march) and to Wölfli's thought and work processes.