Ovartaci, the painter who changed his sex not to go mad: "When the Soul Travels Within"

 

Was he crazy? A genius? Well, somehow he was both, the one who called himself Ovartaci, but started his life in 1894 as Louis Marcussen, the strange son of a Middle Class family in a small town in Denmark, Ebeltoft. That is, he himself saw his true birthday as the 22nd of July 1951, i.e. the day when he cut of his penis. From now on he considered himself what he called a "virul", a third gender or another sort of woman than the natural one. 

When he was a 31 years old painter's assistent he and a friend had gone to Argentina, but something happened that turned this healthy young man into what the doctors saw as a raving madman. He himself considered this new personality of his something quite natural although it frightened him to feel under the command of electricity and electrical outlets. However, diagnosed as a skizophrenic, he was committed to an asylum in Risskov in Denmark and here he started to paint, to make iron sculptures, to write and to talk of his many religious and philosophical visions. The more he did on these lines the better he felt.

 

He also used the names Yvoritaci and Puparpasta, but became famous as Ovartaci. People who knew him as a boy have told that he always was "strange", but now he became more than that, as he e.g. professed himself a prophet and even stated that he had lived more than a 1000 lives already. However, he had had visions of his fame as a painter even before trying his hand at painting. 

In the beginning his motifs were naturalistic renderings of flowers, etc., but then he started to paint his visions. This made him famous and a much-admired artist which was something quite unique for a mental patient at that time. However, he came to commit a sexual offense against one of his papier maché dolls that unfortunately was watched by the neighbours who didn't like what they saw. New restrictions were enforced upon him, but he consoled himself by painting even more and today we have more than 2000 extremely personal and unique paintings by him in the museum for the art of former mental patients by the hospital in Risskov. 

Ovartaci dug deep into mythology, Eastern religions and his own perception of his many earlier incarnations. According to him he had lived as a butterfly in Spain, the daugther of Chinese emperors, a warrior in Africa who was killed by a lion, etc., etc., etc.. He most often chose to paint women and for a long time it was his absolute wish to become a woman himself. After he had emasculated himself by cutting off what he called his "petil" he became even more prolific - also more devious as he built himself a sort of helicopter in order to flee the hospital. When the stupid thing didn't take off as he had planned he became very disappointed and bitter, but with time he came to find his stay in the hospital more and more endurable. 

It seems that his art almost healed him, also of many of his delusions so that he grew more and more "normal" with age. He died in 1985, 91 years old and after 56 years in mental hospitals, but still a great and quite unique artist. 

 

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