Adolf Wölfli – Creator of the Universe (Czech edition)

The Swiss artist Adopf Wölfli (1864–1930) was a lifelong outsider, an orphan, a rascal and a laborer who, during his thirty years’ internment in an insane asylum transformed the misery in his life into a gigantic synthetic work amounting to 25,000 pages of text, drawings, collages and musical and numerical records. Today he is considered as the most important art brut artist and the creator of some of the most remarkable works of the 20th century in general.

This first Czech monograph on the artist covers his entire artistic and literary ouevre. The picture catalogue places an emphasis on details of the drawings and collages which allows for insight into Wölfli’s labyrinthine personal mythology. After the introductory texts and the artist’s biography, compiled from autobiographical passages from his writings and from medical records, the reader is presented with Wölfli’s real Short Biography, which he wrote after his arrival in the psychiatric hospital in Waldau.

The book presents pictorial and written examples from the epic From the Cradle to the Grave in which the artist recounts his fictitious beautiful childhood, discovers the world and creates everything within it. In the following Geographic and Algebraic Books he occupies the whole world and expands into the universe. His gigantic “St. Adolf-Giant Creation“ is a chant included in Books with Songs and Dances, in which Wölfli transfers music into a form of abstract sounds combined with numbers, and which culminates with his personal requiem – Funeral March. The book also includes examples of art pieces which Wölfli made for sale and which brought him fame in the art world. The final part of the monograph is comprised of texts from experts on Wölfli which reveal particular aspects of the work, a list of reproductions, exhibitions and a bibliography.

The book has been produced in both Czech and English editions.