Exhibition ADELHEID DUVANEL open art museum

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 delicate, laconic text miniatures have long been considered among the most distinctive voices in Swiss literature, her visual art has received little recognition to date.

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 the collection of her brother Felix Feigenwinter to the museum. In 2021, another 40 drawings were added. At the same time, numerous publications appeared that shed new light on Duvanel's literary and visual art.

The current exhibition now brings together groups of works from the museum's collection with paintings from the UPK Basel's picture archive. It once again showcases Adelheid Duvanel's impressive visual world – art that tells the story of otherness, loneliness, and the longing for security in an unvarnished yet sensitive way. Although Adelheid Duvanel was active as a writer in the professional cultural scene, she was not influenced by artistic trends, fashions, or the Basel art scene. A tightrope walker in life, she remained an outsider in art as well, using artistic means to work through her own issues. This is how the award-winning writer became an outsider artist. However, her drawings should not be understood as biographical illustrations, but as independent forms of artistic expression.

Parallel to this exhibition, the open art museum is showing artistic works from the picture archive of the University Psychiatric Clinics (UPK) in Basel.