Hasli=Thal, im Berner=Oberland 1917

Adolf Wölfli made this drawing called Hasli=Thal, im Berner=Oberland, but we don’t know exactly when or with what. Look at all these nested compartments: inside one another, and inside another… I feel a crazy echo in this artwork. It’s just bursting with this urge for organization, where tiny patterns become another pattern. Poor Wölfli, I wonder what he was thinking, sitting there making this little world of intricate patterns? Each mark looks like a labor of love – or maybe an exorcism of boredom. The whole thing is so tightly packed, it makes you want to loosen it up, pull it apart and see what's inside. So many artists have felt this drive—to order things, make sense of the chaos, and create a world within a world. Think of Hilma af Klint’s diagrammatic abstractions, or even some of Agnes Martin’s grids. It's like they are all whispering to each other across time.