Adelheid Duvanel

The open art museum is dedicating a comprehensive exhibition of drawings and paintings to the Basel writer and artist Adelheid Duvanel (1936-1996). While her fine, laconic text miniatures have long been among the most independent voices in Swiss literature, her visual art work has received little recognition to date.

Back in 2009, the open art museum presented its first retrospective with loans from the Swiss Literary Archives, the UPK Basel and the Dammann Collection. This exhibition brought an important group of works from her brother Felix Feigenwinter’s collection to the museum. A further 40 drawings were added in 2021. At the same time, numerous publications appeared that shed light on Duvanel’s literary and pictorial oeuvre from new perspectives.

The current exhibition now combines groups of works from the museum’s collection with paintings from the UPK Basel’s picture storage. It makes Adelheid Duvanel’s impressive visual world visible once again – an art that tells of otherness, loneliness and the longing for security in an unembellished and at the same time sensitive way.

Although Adelheid Duvanel was involved in the professional cultural scene as a writer, she did not follow artistic trends, fashions or the Basel art scene. A tightrope walker in life, she also remained an outsider in art, using artistic means to work on herself. The award-winning writer thus became an outsider artist. However, her drawings are not to be understood as biographical illustrations, but also as independent forms of artistic expression.

Even in her early drawings of the 1950s, Duvanel devoted herself to people on the margins of society, fragile female figures and refugee children. Fear, loneliness, depression, illness and death permeate her work and lend it an unmistakable intensity. Literary scholar Peter von Matt summarizes this uncompromising attitude as follows:

“Everything that makes her art so oppressive is there from the beginning. Phases of development, stages on a path from imitative to original storytelling are not recognizable … Achieving the greatest possible concentration in the smallest possible space was the aesthetic imperative under which she stood.”

After a long creative break, Duvanel began to draw and paint again in 1980 in the safe environment of the University Psychiatric Clinics (UPK) in Basel. This new beginning was triggered by her separation from Joe Duvanel, who, himself a painter, had previously forbidden her to paint. The 1980s became her most productive phase: she filled sheet after sheet with ballpoint pen and felt-tip pen drawings on A4 paper, often in bright, high-contrast colors such as pink, rose or violet. At the same time, she created large-format acrylic paintings.

His early work from the 1950s and 1960s includes drawings and paintings in chalk, pencil, colored pencil and ballpoint pen. It shows surreal scenes, portraits, often caricatures with deformed bodies and depictions of the mentally ill and people with disabilities.

Her motifs revolve around existential themes such as mother and child, man and woman, fear and threat, loneliness and loss, illness and death. Time and again she deals with patriarchal structures, shows broken female figures, threatened children and the longing for security. Religious metaphors such as the crown of thorns or mandorla lend her works a timeless dimension. Inscriptions often complement the pictorial scenes and reinforce their emotional impact.

The late work from 1980 onwards is characterized by a radical simplification of the figurative design: angular bodies, pointed forms, expressively elongated limbs and garish colours characterize these works. Despite the seemingly naïve style, surreal, dreamlike scenes emerge that are both touching and disturbing. The figures uncompromisingly reflect their own existence – a deeply personal and emphatically feminine art.