biography of adolf wölfli (1864-1930)

Adolf Wolfli was an or­phan, who spent half of his life in an asy­lum for the men­tally ill in Wal­dau near Bern. He was able to trans­form his so­cial iso­la­tion and men­tal dis­abil­ity through his bound­less cre­ative po­ten­tial. Wölfli cre­ated a com­plex par­al­lel world, for which he in­vented a new bi­og­ra­phy, an imag­i­nary ge­og­ra­phy and an al­ter­na­tive his­tory, as well as a new range of nu­mer­als and thou­sands of songs. His life work, the es­tab­lish­ment of the "St. Adolf Gi­ant Cre­ation", is con­tained in 45 books and more than 25,000 pages of texts, mu­si­cal scores, nu­mero­log­i­cal records and, above all, 1,600 draw­ings and 1,640 col­lages. De­spite the fact that Wölfli's iconog­ra­phy is rooted in the cul­ture which sur­rounded him, he tran­scends this cul­ture by fill­ing it with a new mean­ing in cor­re­spon­dence with his per­sonal mythol­ogy.