AUGUST NATTERER (1868 -1933) - Everything you can imagine is real

World Axis with Hare Around.



August Natterer was a German schizophrenic outsider artist.
The youngest of nine children, Natterer was successful in business and boasted a stable domestic life, but was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt in 1907, after succumbing to depression and experiencing detailed visual hallucinations. Whilst in hospital he began to construct a marvellously detailed delusional system where he began to complete the task of redemption that for him Christ had left undone from his position in a global hierarchy in which he was the highest authority.
His transformation from an ordinary man who had never painted before was amazing, he had a profound effective epihany where primary hallucinations consisted of celestial stages or screens where ten tousand 'pictures followed one another like lightning', including a vision of God, 'the witch who created world'.

The Witches Head, circa 1915


My eyes in the time of appreciation.

He was to remain hospitalized in several mental asylums for the rest of his life, until he died in an asylum in Rottwei in 1933, he was 28. He left behind an amazing array of drawings and paintings that captured his visions.
His legacy is left perhaps with the Surrealists who were drawn to his work because it embodied in a spontaneous way the metamorphosis of objects and concepts that was central to their work. Their is for me an underlying beauty to his work that stand today as a testement to the richness of his delusions.

Anti- Christ