Untitled (Maledictio gentibus terrae! Amen!)

After a severe psychotic attack in Paris 1878 Carl Fredrik Hill was hospitalized at the age of 28, his career as a landscape painter came to an untimely end. Cared for by his mother and sister, Hill spent the years from 1883 until his death in 1911 in his native town Lund in Sweden. His manifold and impressive drawings, for which he has become famous, date from that time. Hill has been regarded as a major voice of inner emigration in the context of the art of mentally disordered persons and outsiders. He was diagnosed a schizophrenic. Displaying more subtlety, today’s approaches see his work rooted between aesthetic self-determination and state-bound art. The exciting, wild world of his drawings contrasts sharply with his outwardly almost eventless life. Hill’s understanding of himself oscillated between self-tormenting, guilt-ridden doubts and brilliant exuberance. We know that he had visual and auditory hallucinations and that he was obsessed with the written word and numerology. One can see the words and numbers on his sketches but only occasionally do we see a connection between words and pictures. It’s as if the words functioned independently of pictures. In this drawing, there is a relationship between image and text in which the depicted man seems to express both a curse and prayer.