Some artists leave us tangled legacies– reputations tied up in creative theft, family feuds and unresolved estates. Others, like Adolf Wölfli, leave us a veritable Pandora’s Box for consideration. At a glance, Wölfli’s work oozes the sentiments of Psychedelic art; its kaleidoscopic swirls of colour look fresh off the Haight Ashbury, circa 1967. In truth, they’re the relics of a man orphaned in the 1800s, whose life was bookended by the abuse he both received and committed, and whose days were spent incarcerated at a Swiss mental hospital with schizophrenia. But that madness also incubated one of the most jaw-dropping works in Art Brut history: a 25,000-page, fictionalised autobiography filled with reptiles, knights, and dancing shadows; insect musicians, Algebra, and melancholic sheet music. Surrealist giant Andre Breton called it, “one of the three or four most important oeuvres of the twentieth century.” We call it a reminder that talent is not only transformative, but blind in picking its artist…
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