August Walla

Austrian, 20th century.
Born 1936, Klosterneuburg, Austria; died 2001, Vienna, Austria.

Born in Klosterneuburg in 1936, August Walla experienced a difficult childhood. Due to the untimely death of his father, he developed an unhealthy attachment to his mother, who would become his primary caretaker. After he threatened suicide at age 16 in 1952, Walla was diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized until 1957, and released to his mother’s care.

In 1970, Walla was admitted to the hospital in Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, and in 1986 became a resident in Dr. Navratil’s Center for Art and Psychotherapy, later named House of Artists (Haus der Kunstler). This visionary workshop broke new ground by allowing patients to live and work with dignity as artists, to express themselves freely, and to completely decorate their house, an activity that encouraged Walla to flourish as a painter and mixed-media artist.

Walla’s wildly expressive painting style is marked by a stylized, often grotesque figuration, and a bombastic use of text that both confronts his viewers with dramatic declarations, and visually activates each composition. He also worked with found objects to craft enigmatic assemblages, an integral part of his oeuvre.

Walla’s work reflects nothing less than an alternate universe in which good and evil avatars clash continually in epic conflict. The creativity and intelligence reflected in the artist’s reimagining of both religious and political symbolism is staggering. Walla appropriated major political symbols, reinventing them to transform his own gender expression from a feminine persona (the swastika) to a masculine one (hammer and sickle). Often misinterpreted as nonsense, his poetic, polyglot wordplay reflects a highly coded system of signification that marks his own construction of identity, and his universal cosmology.

Perhaps one day, scholars of both art and poetry will collaborate to unlock the lessons contained in the legacy of Walla, and of other visionaries who shaped alternate worlds with both text and image. For now, his work is praised mainly for its visual impact. Thanks to Gugging’s longstanding practice of welcoming trained artists to work side by side with residents, Walla and his colleagues have had a measurable impact on contemporary art.

- Jenifer P. Borum

Biography

CV