Lot 503 R

'Stöhrer's pictures appear as an event, as a dynamic combination of painterly and drawn activities, traces of erupting gestures, as the dregs of the painting process, in the bodily movements - the hand, arm or the whole person - of which the artist expresses himself. The expression becomes the pictorial gesture. At the same time it addresses the doubts about the valid form that this art takes as its basis, the excessive contradiction of a pictorial action, a work process of energetic allusions by deliberately leaving to chance. [...] This work begins each time with the irritation of the initial application on the picture plane, those lineal proto-figures, the drawn pre-forms, which each provide the first impetus. Thus to begin with, various separate areas are formed on the open terrain of the canvas, which still however correspond arbitrarily to one another: core zones of the picture form, whose final state is not a foregone conclusion, but which develop in the alternation of action and reaction and which are progressively refined and by doing so find form and subject.' (Jürgen Schultze, Die Schönheit wird konvulsiv sein oder sie wird nicht sein, in: Annette Meyer zu Eissen and Dieter Blume (ed.), Walter Stöhrer, Arbeiten 1962-1983, exhib.cat. Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Berlin 1984, p.13/14)