August Walla

1936-2001 · Gugging, Austria

He painted gods, symbols and words on walls, roads, trees and whole rooms, an entire personal religion with its own alphabet department.

The life

Walla’s childhood in wartime Austria was scrambled by bomb shelters and a smothering, complicated home. He wrote and painted compulsively wherever surfaces allowed, roadside walls included, long before the Gugging clinic near Vienna took him in. At the House of Artists he became, alongside Johann Hauser, its defining figure, his bedroom painted floor to ceiling into a total artwork that the Museum Gugging preserves intact.

The work

Canvases, walls and objects crowded with his personal cosmology: paired gods and devils, political emblems, invented saints, and words in German, Russian, Greek and alphabets of his own, all deployed like protective spells. He photographed his own street inscriptions, documenting himself decades before that was a genre.

Why we love them

Walla treated the entire visible world as unpainted canvas that had simply not been reached yet. Correct.

Go deeper

• Museum Gugging
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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