August Walla, 1936–

Born on June 22, 1936 in Klosterneuberg in Lower Austria, August Walla remained an only son and had a very tight bond with his mother, who raised him as if her were a girl, hoping thus to spare him being enlisted in the army. He imagined for a long time that Hitler was his father, not having known his own, who died during his early childhood. Incapable of adapting to school, he was placed in a specialized institution. At the age of nine, after having lived through the traumatizing experience of losing sleep for three months, he wrote in his school notebooks: “Everything that is red is diabolical.” The punching bag of his classmates, he remained helpless, regretting he was not a girl. At age 16, after having threatened to commit suicide and to burn down his house, he was committed for four years to a psychiatric hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Upon his departure, his mother dedicated herself entirely to him. But in 1970, August was again admitted to the psychiatric ward, in the Gugging hospital, near Vienna. Sixteen years later, he became one of the members of the House of Artists (Haus der Künstler), created a few years earlier by Doctor Navratil outside the hospital, and where he would remain until the end of his life.

August Walla was born in Klosterneuburg in 1936, Austria. While his mother Aloisia, a single 40-year-old woman, worked to support Walla, her own mother cared for him until her death when he was six years old. During the Nazi era Walla’s mother raised him as a girl, hoping to spare her son from being drafted into war. Later, Walla became aware of his male identity and, looking back on his childhood, he decided that the Russian occupants must have operated on him and turned him into a ‘Russian boy’. He therefore used the swastika as a symbol of being female and the hammer and sickle, representing communism or Russianness, as a symbol of being male. Walla never met his father and did not know his identity, but for a long time he believed that his father was Hitler because he heard his voice on the radio and so he sometimes called himself ‘Adolfe’.

Within the middle-class society of Klosterneuburg, mother-and-son Walla were notorious outsiders. Although he was of normal intelligence, Walla was sent to a school for children with learning difficulties where he did not socialise well or like to learn. His education ended with primary school. Around this time, at the age of ten, Walla made his first drawings. For many years, Walla lived in a small apartment with his mother when he was not hospitalised: he first spent time in a psychiatric institution when he was 17 years old and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Also at the age of 17, Walla started writing, and making objects and graffiti.

Like Wölfli, Walla filled pages with writing and when the sheet of paper turned out to be too narrow, he covered the walls of his room with drawings and inscriptions. Sometimes, he even painted on trees or on roads, only to then photograph his messages with a camera he had painted green because he hated black. Walla constantly invented imaginary languages inspired by his readings of foreign language dictionaries. Writing and drawing are inseparable in his work, covered in obsessive symbols and which develops as a continuum, of which each part seems inseparable from the ensemble.

For almost 25 years, August Walla has been considered a “classic” of Art Brut and, as such, appears in the most important public and private collections