Feed-back is the law: Walter Stöhrer was an artist who incorporated literature into art, making it the subject of his intellectual nourishment. He would tear quotations, fragments, and ideas from their contexts and use them—respectfully, tenderly, and powerfully—as starting points for his paintings. The feedback that we all need so much from others or from things themselves, the line “the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law,” was taken from the American poet Charles Ohlsen’s (1910–1970) most famous poem, “The Kingfishers.”

Stöhrer’s art is a great resonating space of many different influences, which he was able—as varied as they were—to transform into vibrantly dancing images. Emotions, knowledge, literature, and life: all of this is brought together in his paintings, fascinating us perpetually. His works are a constant echo of our notions and ideas; every element, every detail, is immensely fresh and current.

Walter Stöhrer has always dedicated himself to the pulsating, emotionally charged chaos of humans and the figure. This solo exhibition focuses on his extremely dynamic paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s, and is accompanied by works on paper from throughout his creative period. A series of small-format, highly personal drawings and sketches, exclusively from the estate of the Walter Stöhrer Foundation, will also be shown for the first time, providing an intimate and impressive glimpse into the artist’s studio and Stöhrer’s working methods. 

Walter Stöhrer was born in Stuttgart in 1937. After dropping out of his studies under HAP Grieshaber at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Stöhrer moved to West Berlin in 1959. He was a professor of painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1986 onward. He died in Scholderup in 2000.