Christoph Kolombus

"For Wölfli, mental illness and seclusion led to the creation of an entirely imaginary world in which he got revenge on reality in the most spectacular way." (André Breton)

Adolf Wölfli devoted himself to art in the isolation of the Waldau clinic for 35 years. In 1921, a monograph by Doctor Morgenthaler brought him certain renown. In drawing, poetry and composing, he produced a prodigious body of work on his reinvented life. This self-portrait as Christopher Columbus is like a final testimony to a life of earthly and cosmogonical conquests. One of his final drawings, it is a masterly résumé of the initiatory power of an invitation to a land elsewhere.