Adolf Wölfli – Creator of the universe

The Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) was a lifelong outsider, orphan, day laborer and auxiliary worker who, during his thirty-year internment in a mental institution, transformed his life's misery into a gigantic synthetic work of 25,000 pages of texts, drawings, collages and music and numbers records

The Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) was a lifelong outsider, orphan, day laborer and auxiliary worker who, during his thirty-year internment in a mental institution, transformed his life's misery into a gigantic synthetic work of 25,000 pages of texts, drawings, collages and music and numbers records.

The first Czech monograph of the author, who today is considered the most important creator of art brut and the creator of one of the most remarkable works of the 20th century in general, covers all periods of his artistic and literary expression. The pictorial part of the book emphasizes details from drawings and collages, which allow a better penetration into the labyrinth of Wölfli's universe built on his personal mythology.

After the introductory texts and the biography of Adolf Wölfli, compiled from autobiographical excerpts from his writings and medical records, the reader first gets acquainted with Wölfli's real Short Biography, which he wrote after entering the psychiatric hospital in Waldau. After the first, still black-and-white drawings, the book presents pictorial and written examples from the epic From the Cradle to the Grave, in which the author describes his fabled wonderful childhood in the form of a travel diary, discovers the world and creates an inventory of it.

In the following Geography and Numerical Notebooks, he conquers the entire Earth and expands into space. His "Giant Creation of St. Adolf" is then sung in the Song and Dance Notebooks, where the music is transformed into the form of abstract sounds interspersed with numbers, and culminates in his personal requiem - the Funeral March. The book also includes examples of the works of art that Wölfli created for sale and which first made him famous in the art world. The final part of the monograph contains texts from leading experts on Wölfli's work, who decipher individual aspects of his work, a list of reproduced works, a list of exhibitions and a bibliography.

The book was published in Czech and English versions.