EXHIBITION 10
Adolf Wölfli: Memorandum
An Oeuvre and its audiences
1.11.2026 – 20.2.2027
You are cordially invited to the opening on Saturday, October 31, from 6 – 9 pm.
In the late 1920s, Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) created two large-format works titled “Memorandum”: the monumental Memorandumm in 1926, followed a year later by Memorandum.Die Trummbann: Schyackt, in Nord=Amerika. The latter, which measures 120 × 187 cm (47 × 74 in), is now in the Zander Collection. The first of these two drawings, executed—like all of Wölfli’s works—in pencil and crayons, was destined for a common room at the Waldau psychiatric institution near Bern, where the artist was a patient for the last thirty-four years of his life; the second was commissioned by a private client, Hermine Ferndriger-Marti, an enthusiast of Carl Gustav Jung’s.
Etymologically, the word “memorandum” is associated with memory and remembrance. In a statement running to fifty-five lines that Wölfli penned on the back of Memorandumm, he accordingly described this work as a “commemoration” of his “most exceptionally intteresting, instructive, ye’ highly dangerous creation=journey.” He was referring to motifs from his literary autofiction, begun in 1908, which recounts his ascent to become the creator of the universe, the “St. Adolf Giant Creation.” But Wölfli also built monuments to himself in both works. More than mere illustrations of an imaginary “creation=journey,” they are allegories and documents of a very concrete creation—visual syntheses of an artistic evolution that unfolded over three decades within the confines of a cell.
Yet along which trajectories, under which circumstances, and based on which interpretations, simplifications, and misunderstandings did this work find its way into the public sphere, and hence into the cultural memory, into private collections, museums, and countless discourses on art, psychosis, and creativity? Why was it forgotten for decades after Wölfli’s death, why did it not garner institutional recognition until the early 1970s? These are the questions that the exhibition “Adolf Wölfli: Memorandum” will explore in dialogue with the Swiss artist’s works from the Zander Collection, retracing the avenues of engagement with his oeuvre from Walter Morgenthaler and Hans Prinzhorn through Jean Dubuffet and André Breton to Harald Szeemann and beyond.
Nothing about Adolf Wölfli’s early life augured his colossal oeuvre. Born in 1864 in Bowil near Bern, he grew up in poverty; after his father, an alcoholic, abandoned the family and his mother died a few years later, he was forced to labor as a farmhand from the age of ten. For another decade, he worked odd jobs, including as a milker, gardener, and gravedigger. Then, in 1890, he was convicted of two counts of attempted sexual assault—the victims were a fourteen-year-old and a five-year-old girl—and sentenced to two years in jail. In 1895, he was imprisoned again for another attempted rape, this time of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl; following a psychiatric evaluation, he was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, declared not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to what was then known as the Bernese Cantonal Mental and Sanatorium Waldau.
Wölfli’s first artistic activities are documented in his medical records starting in 1899; the earliest surviving works date from 1904. What was unusual for the time was that much of the work he produced until his death in 1930 was carefully preserved and collected. Instrumental to these efforts was the Bernese psychiatrist and psychotherapist Walter Morgenthaler, who treated Wölfli between 1908 and 1920, initially as a resident and later as a senior physician; he encouraged his patient to embrace his creative drive and provided him with art supplies. In this way, Morgenthaler—effectively the first member of Wölfli’s audience—also established the institutional conditions for his artistic productivity, long before he introduced him to the larger public in the psychopathography Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler, published in 1921 (an English translation came out under the title Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli). It is the first work to describe a psychiatric patient as an artist.
Wölfli, for his part, was clear that he saw himself as an artist, a self-conception that was evident when he started to make commissioned works in the 1920s. From the outset, he wished to see his writings published; he regarded the pages he had composed down to the last detail as templates for facsimiles and even gave precise instructions regarding the price and distribution of his books. As for the cell he had designed, he expressed the view that it was “a small museum, of the very highest order, of the most intelligent and dignified kynd.” In light of these circumstances, it would appear to have been a misapprehension that led the French artist and collector Jean Dubuffet to choose Wölfli of all people to represent what he championed, in the years after World War II, as “Art brut”—an art he portrayed as raw, unspoiled by training, non-academic.
Still, it is to Dubuffet’s credit that he repeatedly exhibited Wölfli’s work as part of his “Compagnie de l’Art brut.” Inspired by Dubuffet while maintaining a certain distance from his ideas, the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann took the first steps toward putting Wölfli on the map as a museum-worthy artist. His exhibition concept for documenta 5 in Kassel (1972) marked a turning point in the public engagement with Wölfli’s work. In the immediate vicinity of the exhibition “Individual Mythologies,” where Szeemann brought together works of contemporary art by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Christian Boltanski, and others, the curator, in collaboration with the Bernese psychiatrist Theodor Spoerri, presented a section dedicated to the “Pictorial Art of the Mentally Ill,” where a prominent place was reserved for Wölfli. A reconstruction of the artist’s cell under a glass dome housed his writings in a stack that rose to seven feet; a second gallery displayed hundreds of objects from the Museum of Psychiatry at Waldau, including the cabinets decorated by Wölfli.
Charlotte Zander added five of Adolf Wölfli’s works to her collection in 1991: one of his earliest drawings, Nach=Ruef. Marsch=Lied. 1,743(1909), the double-sided collage Die Beatenberg = St. Adolf = (1918), and Memorandum. Die Trummbann: Schyackt, in Nord=Amerika as well as two other large-format pencil-and-crayon drawings. They constitute the largest and most significant body of his work in a German collection. The last time works by Wölfli were on public display in the Rhineland was at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 1977.
The exhibition is curated by the writer, publisher, and translator Maximilian Gillessen.
Supported by:
Neu Cöln
préfète Duffaut
5.11.26 – 8.11.26
Préfète Duffaut (1923–2012) is regarded as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Haitian painting.
A native of Jacmel, a port city on Haiti’s south coast, he initially works as a shipwright and helps his father build sailboats.
Yet even as a child, Duffaut has taken a special interest in drawing, and in the 1940s, a dream vision of the Virgin Mary, who urges him to paint his hometown, leads him to devote himself entirely to painting.
In 1948, Duffaut joins the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince.
Founded four years earlier, the institution offers artists from diverse origins and social backgrounds opportunities to develop their work, exhibit it, and make it accessible to a wider audience. In this way, the Centre d’Art promotes the emergence of an independent Haitian art scene, whose production attracts growing international attention as well.
Duffaut’s early output, in particular, is informed by the Catholic faith. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary and motifs from Haitian voodoo, which is closely bound up with the country’s history and culture, meet on equal terms in his pictures.
When Préfète Duffaut dies at the eighty-nine on October 6, 2012, his oeuvre spans more than seven decades of creative labor. His paintings are exhibited in Haiti and abroad and acquired by both public and private collections.
Neu Cöln
Kloster Heilig Kreuz
Lindenstr. 45
50674 Köln
Séraphine Louis
De Senlis et sans Rivale
31.10.26 – 12.4.27
Séraphine Louis | André Bauchant | Camille Bombois | Adolf Dietrich | Henri Rousseau | Louis Vivin
This autumn, the Centre Pompidou-Metz pays tribute to the artist Séraphine Louis (1864–1942) with a major retrospective. Bringing together more than 80 of the approximately 100 works by the French artist known today, the exhibition “Séraphine Louis: De Senlis et sans rivale” offers an unprecedented scholarly examination of the artist’s work and biography, providing a fresh perspective on her artistic practice. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the many facets of her oeuvre, moving beyond the classifications that have traditionally distanced her work from artistic modernism. The works assembled at the Centre Pompidou-Metz offer insights into Séraphine Louis’s imaginative world and, in doing so, allow her work to be situated within art history.
– Centre Pompidou Metz
Centre Pompidou Metz
1, Parvis de Droit de l’Homme
57000 Metz
beyond Academia:
Bosilj, Sekulić, Skurjeni, Tisnikar
25.9.26 – 28.2.27
Ilija Bosilj | Sava Sekulić | Matija Skurjeni | Jože Tisnikar
The exhibition Beyond Academia presents a comprehensive overview of the work of four exceptional painters from the second half of the 20th century: Ilija Bašičević Bosilj, Sava Sekulić, Matija Skurjeni, and Jože Tisnikar. Each of the four artists has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in their personal experiences, fantastical visions, or dream worlds. Their practices are extremely diverse, radically idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and marked by elements of the mystical and magical.
–Galerija Božidar Jakac
Galerija Božidar Jakac – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Grajska cesta 45
8311 Kostanjevica na Krki
Slovenia
Milestone Cooperation on Self-Taught and Outsider Artists’ Work in Cologne. The Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek and ZADIK Receive Major Gifts from the Zander Collection
In 1997, Charlotte Zander was the first woman to be honored with the ART COLOGNE Award for her formidable dedication to “naïve art.” Twenty-eight years later, the documentation and scholarly study of the works of self-taught and outsider artists are firmly established in Cologne, with permanent representation at three venues: last fall, the nonprofit Zander Collection inaugurated an exhibition space in Cologne where exhibitions of works from the collection are held on a regular basis. Susanne Zander now gifts the internationally unrivaled specialized library with literature on the collection’s themes to the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln (KMB), where scholars can access it effective immediately. Meanwhile, the collector, gallery owner, and museum founder Charlotte Zander’s archive has been entrusted to ZADIK, where it is being made accessible to researchers. ZADIK is preparing a thematically focused exhibition, which will open in 2025.
Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, director of ZADIK, is delighted: “In the extensive archival material documenting Charlotte Zander’s work, ZADIK now possesses a stock of high-quality sources providing insight into her collection-building activities going back to the 1950s. Because she turned her personal passion into a profession, founding a gallery and, later, a museum, the archive also enables us to learn more about the international networks of dealers and museums handling and showcasing ‘naïve art.’”
Susanne Zander, CEO of Sammlung Zander, is confident that the gifts have opened up new avenues of access to the work of self-taught and outsider artists for specialists and the broader public alike: “One objective of our work with the Zander Collection is to facilitate and promote scholarly engagement with this art. We want to establish Cologne as a central setting of such research. The gifts, which also encompass my personal extensive library on so-called outsider art, are a vital step toward this goal. We are moreover developing new projects involving the collection that embed our exhibitions in diverse discursive and scholarly contexts.”
Elke Purpus, director of the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, is inviting the interested public to come and start reading: “We have already entered 2,449 publications into our online catalogue—the work is almost complete. We look forward to welcoming many visitors wishing to consult the Zander Library.”
Bringing both an archive and the related specialized library to Cologne is a model that ZADIK and the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek have successfully implemented in a series of instances. They underscore its advantages: “It is only a short walk from one institution to the other, enabling scholars to take full advantage of the two related sets of holdings—a collaboration we intend to consolidate and expand on.”