"Born in Prussia in 1892, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern lived a peripatetic life marked in large part by ineptitude, indecency and insanity. He was a dairy farmer, a circus performer, a cigar seller, a horse thief, a blackmailer, a cult leader, a penal camp prisoner and a habitual asylum internee. Yet it was only after World War II, when Schröder-Sonnenstern was in his 50s and living amidst the hardships and deprivations of a splintered Germany, that he finally sank to his lowest level and became an artist.
In the drawings that suddenly poured out of him, exhibited recently at Michael Werner in a show titled ‘From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist’, Schröder-Sonnenstern finally seemed to chime with the chaos of his times. Depicting scenes of torture, grotesquery, scatology and deformity, all drawn in sickly crayon and coloured pencil, Schröder-Sonnenstern’s pictures speak of a world gone to hell." - quote taken from article on the artist at Frieze Magazine.
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