The open art museum, St.Gallen is dedicating a comprehensive exhibition to the Basel writer and artist Adelheid Duvanel (1936-1996) from November 9, 2025 to October 18, 2026. exhibition with drawings and paintings. 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.

Adelheid Duvanel

Adelheid Duvanel (1936-1996), born Feigenwinter, grew up in Pratteln (BL) in an authoritarian Catholic family. Duvanel showed great artistic talent at an early age and was encouraged as a child prodigy. She wrote stories and plays, drew and painted. In 1950, she spent a year at a Catholic boarding school for girls on Lake Neuchâtel. While she was still away, the family moved to the Rotacker district of Basel.

In 1953, Duvanel was admitted to the Psychiatric University Clinic Basel (now the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel UPK) after a suicide attempt. After her release, she attended the School of Applied Arts and began training as an advertising graphic designer and textile draughtswoman, which she did not continue.

Sketches, caricatures and portraits of people from her surroundings date from the 1950s. Her strokes became freer over the years and her motifs changed. In 1965, she created a group of pencil drawings on A4, in which she sketched people living in poverty, fragile female figures and, repeatedly, refugee children. She draws them with oversized, sad and empty eyes. With just a few strokes, she creates figures that go beyond mere likenesses. The portraits from this period tell an unembellished and empathetic story of otherness, of loneliness and exclusion. They resemble the protagonists of her stories.

1950s to 1960s: Painting in text and image

Adelheid Duvanel’s attempt to study at the art academy fails. She deals with the situation in the story Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Waschtag: “[…] Since my character is not suited to depicting a portrait with colors, I got into the habit of painting with words.” (in: Basler Nachrichten, 26.7.1965).

Duvanel now turns more intensively to writing and publishes in newspapers under the names Adelheid Feigenwinter, Judith Januar and Martina. She frequents the Café Atlantis, a meeting place for existentialists, reads Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and sells her first painting at an art exhibition in Liestal.

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, surrealist elements increasingly appeared in her paintings. Duvanel draws the figures with a line. They move in dreamlike scenes and are surrounded by enigmatic objects. The pictorial plots are mysterious and leave a feeling of diffuse unease. In addition to pencil and ballpoint pen, she now uses techniques such as oil, gouache and chalk; sometimes she carves lines into the painting ground with a brush handle. She paints portraits and self-portraits. People remain her main motif.

1960s to 1970s: Forced artistic standstill

In 1962, Adelheid Feigenwinter marries the painter Josef (Joe) Duvanel. Their shared apartment becomes a meeting place for Basel bohemians. She took drugs and drank, but otherwise remained on the fringes of events. Their daughter Adelheid was born in 1964. Joe, who is considered gentle and sensitive, develops despotic traits in the marriage. He does not tolerate his wife painting or drawing and destroys around a hundred of her works, as she later confides to her pen pal and writer friend Maja Beutler.

In 1968, the family emigrated to Formentera and returned to Basel a year later. Joe Duvanel began a relationship with Lilianne Balloux, who had a son with him in 1969. At times they all lived under the same roof. Family life is full of conflict and characterized by emotional dependencies. Adelheid Duvanel works in an office to earn a living.

Publications continue to appear in the Basler Nachrichten, in various anthologies, magazines and, since 1976, in three volumes of short stories. In 1978, Duvanel’s life began to undergo several upheavals. The former director of Luchterhand Verlag, Otto F. Walter, recommended her to the publishing house in the summer of 1979. This marked the beginning of her literary career. By the time of her death, her stories had appeared in nine publications. She received several awards, including the Literature Prize of the City of Basel in 1987.

1980s: “And I draw and draw and draw”

The eighties became the main phase of Adelheid Duvanel’s artistic work. After an enforced break of twenty years, she began to draw again in the protected environment of the Psychiatric University Clinic Basel (today: UPK). Various family crises, living with her husband’s parallel family, her daughter’s progressive drug addiction and the resulting rift between father and daughter lead to a breakdown for Adelheid Duvanel. She is admitted to what is now the UPK and repeatedly visits the clinic as a refuge in the years to come. The marriage was divorced in 1982, but she found it difficult to let go until Joe Duvanel’s suicide four years later and beyond. During this time, she created her expressive felt-tip pen drawings, initially in the clinic and continuing into the 1990s. In November 1983, she wrote to Maja Beutler: “And I draw and draw and draw.”

The works from this period exhibit an intense, bright and colorful palette, a strong figurative simplification, ornamental elements and pictorial themes that move between dream and reality. The works revolve around the themes of violence, loneliness, depression, fear, addiction and loss. With their overlong limbs, wide open eyes and mouths, the figures express great distress and mental anguish. Felt-tip pen drawings tell of a deeply felt desire for security in touching images. Even in her early works, Duvanel takes up the symbolically charged pictorial theme of mother and child. In comparison with earlier works, the particularly intimate connection between woman and child is striking in the 1980s. The women’s bodies wrap themselves closely around those of the children. The aspect of protection comes to the fore. In many cases, mother and child appear surrounded by a kind of ornamental protective wall with spikes pointing outwards. But even in this space, the demons have already penetrated. Duvanel’s daughter falls deeper into the drug milieu and becomes ill with Aids. The artist herself is addicted to pills and alcohol and uses cocaine to cope with everyday life, as she writes. She lives in poverty, supports and cares for her daughter, repeatedly takes her and her granddaughter Blanca Adela in as protection and even takes the granddaughter with her to the clinic. In 1990, she created another series of eleven larger paintings in the psychiatric clinic. They show parallels to the felt-tip pen drawings in terms of color and the use of ornamentation, but in comparison with them they radiate a great sense of calm.

Her death is as tragic as her life. Adelheid Duvanel froze to death in a forest near Liestal on a very cold July night in 1996.