Wölfli, Adolf, 1864-1930

Adolf Wölfli (February 29, 1864 – November 6, 1930) was a Swiss visual artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent most of his life confined to the Waldau psychiatric clinic in Bern, where his involvement with art began. He is the creator of a large-scale and extremely complex work that is difficult to categorize. Meticulously numbered, dated and organized in handmade books, his paintings and drawings are accompanied by images, texts, numerical calculations, musical notation and geometric symbols, constituting a multidimensional artistic work consisting of approximately 25,000 pages. His painting is distinguished for its original and highly idiosyncratic use of color, while his compositions are distinguished for their detailed structure and organization. His work is largely autobiographical and deals with a personal mythology, centered on the fictional creation of his alter ego, Saint Adolf.