Lot 99 D

'Language in a rhythm of colour streams and rivulets. Gestural action and the reflective word. Individual places and landscapes as book stations and reading experiences. At the same time both calculation and flame: simultaneity as a collage principle and text as a basic autobiographical structure. And Stöhrer with eyes that move back and forth. Knowing that life is over when it becomes a habit.
Stöhrer living in rivalry with language. Living with the anger of his senses. In February and March 1982, a dozen large-format paintings and a series of gouaches are being created during the “painting process” at the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn which are based on the fragments of Empedocles' work 'On the Isolated Outgrowth of the Parts of the Body and their Manifold Assembly'. Perceiving and thinking as a physical process. Birth and rebirth as desired by Laure: living beings as randomly mixed products of individual body parts and limbs. And thus, all beings are gifted with consciousness by the will of chance (a quotation from 19.2.82) and scattered limbs wander around, seeking mutual union, as Stöhrer had always shown in his pictures. A fragment of text as if the wise prophet Empedocles had described his pictures: the tools of the senses as a key to the inside, as an access to thinking. For Stöhrer, a word find that made him triumph! Kasper Hauser as a drag-footed man with countless hands.'
(Walter Aue, Collage Mensch, Die Einverleibung der Wörter, in: Walter Stöhrer Arbeiten 1962 - 1983, exhib. cat. Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1984, p.42).