VICTOR EMANUEL BICKEL

b. 1928 Augsburg, Germany
d. 2018 Wyla, Sitzerland

WORKS    |    BIOGRAPHY    |    EXHIBITIONS    |    PUBLICATIONS

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

At the age of five, Victor Emanuel Bickel suffered a severe concussion in a bicycle accident. Awakened from unconsciousness, he did not know whether he was alive or dead. Since then, he has experienced spontaneously altered states of consciousness in which he had the feeling of living in a completely alien world. In jest he later told his friends: "I am not from this world, but come from another planet".

The other harrowing event that overshadowed his life was the premature death of his beloved, highly gifted older sister. Victor Emanuel was eleven years old at the time. He spontaneously began to draw as if under duress, but finally decided on a career as a classical musician. After the Second World War he attended the Munich Academy of Music and was immediately engaged as a violist in the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

At the same time, he became a self-taught artist. The strange altered states of consciousness and his unusually intense dreams, in which distant worlds, lost and unknown civilizations play a part, led to a phase of thorough examination of the spiritual traditions of ancient cultures, philosophy, mysticism and esotericism.

When he drew, Victor Emanuel Bickel did not know what was going to happen. He was surprised when graceful, poetic, sometimes playful images emerged in which eccentric inhabitants of distant worlds appeared. Strange architectures with elements of lost American and Asian civilizations unfolded from organic forms, embedded in an aura of scenes reminiscent of science fiction fantasies. Bickel developed a subtle painting technique with pencils, crayons, chalks, and ballpoint pens that make his delicate, pastel-colored, but also his color-saturated works appear weightless – of almost aeolian transparency. He began to sign his works Faroxis or Seraphinus Faroxis, sometimes simply with his middle name Emanuel.

At the age of 50 he suffered acute hearing loss and had to retire early. Nevertheless, he kept his cheerful, serene nature and from then on devoted himself entirely to drawing and painting.

For Victor Emanuel Bickel, the visions he created were messages to humanity from an unknown dimension, revelations from higher levels of consciousness. The evolution of consciousness, the inner becoming was the leitmotif of his work. This is the reason why he considered his paintings never really finished. He often revised them, even years later, cut out an element and pasted in a new one or drew the same theme again and again in many variations. The message contained in the works matured within him over time.

Bickel had the impression that he had either previously lived in these extraterrestrial worlds or would exist there in a parallel universe. He had the feeling that the subjects of his works, which were to be recorded on paper, had been transmitted to him by the "Wise Council of the Invisible".

EXHIBITIONS

1978 Holbeinhaus, Augsburg, Germany
1977 Galerie Manfred Arndt, Munich, Germany

PUBLICATIONS

Gruber, Elmar R., Inspiration from the Wise Council of the Invisibles: In memory of Victor Emanuel Bickel (1928–2018). CoMA, 2017 [view online]
Giovetti, Paola, Arte medianica. Pitture e disegni dei sensitivi. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1982, pp. 79-84.