Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery (New York and Berlin)
An exhibition of twenty-eight truly incredible, even mind-boggling, drawings by an obscure outsider artist was hardly what I expected to find in the parquet-floored galleries of the Upper East Side. First of all, I must preface that I abhor the term “outsider art,” but Schroder-Sönnenstern certainly was never in the ‘front line’ of his contemporaries, and after a little research, I came to learn that he was socially obscure and ostracized. This is visible in his drawings on view (all pencil and colored pencil on cardboard), which are strange and fantastical. As Jean Dubuffet would describe Art Brut (or Outsider Art), these drawings were created from “unselfconscious imagery born of pure, uninhibited expression.”
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