Hans Schärer | The New Yorker
Dec 05 2015
The Swiss autodidact painted with an intensity and an oddity that placed him beyond the mainstream. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Schärer createded the dozens of gritty, kohl-eyed Madonnas seen here, often with bared teeth and a third eye. But there’s no Virgin to be found in the gloriously bonkers erotic watercolors he was painting at the same time, in which nude women prostrate themselves before maypoles, rut for stadium crowds, and suckle at a three-nippled breast in the sky. Distinctions between the sacred and the profane become as meaningless as those between “outsider” and “insider” artist. Through February 7.