Tiger=Zohrn=Riesen=Gletscher,=Hochalp=Stok, in Nordwest=Indien 1917

Adolf Wölfli made this incredible pencil drawing, Tiger=Zohrn=Riesen=Gletscher, sometime before 1930, a whole universe squeezed onto a single page. It’s like he’s not just depicting a scene but building it, brick by brick, out of marks. Check out how the mountain, or maybe it’s a glacier, is made up of stripes of red, yellow, and white, as though the landscape itself is just another layer of decoration. There are the strange, symmetrical figures that look like a cross between birds and deities, and the geometric patterns everywhere, even the writing seems to be part of the architecture. It’s all so meticulously rendered, like a form of obsessive world-building! I’m reminded of other visionary artists like Hilma af Klint, in that they are each creating their own private language, but Wölfli’s feels more urgent, more desperate, a pure outpouring of the imagination. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to make sense to be deeply meaningful.