"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.
