Schröder-Sonnenstern’s pictures inhabit a world of their own – strange, crowded, dreamlike places where human and animal forms merge, bodies become symbols, and sexuality, humour and menace are inseparably entwined. Working primarily in coloured pencil and crayon, he constructed intensely detailed compositions populated by his characteristic hybrid creatures, surrounded by eyes, spirals, stars, snakes, moons and other recurring motifs. The sexual imagery is striking, but is only one part of a much larger personal cosmology in which eroticism, morality, religion and social criticism collide.

Contemporary accounts sometimes interpreted the eroticised demons and moon spirits as part of a broader critique of social conformity, consumerism, and what Schröder-Sonnenstern appeared to regard as the absurdity of modern life. Many of his titles – Die mondmoralische Bestandaufnahme; einmalige Ausführung (The Moon-Moral Stocktaking; One-Off Version), and Der Wettlauf zwischen Kopf und Beinen (The Footrace between Head and Legs) – support such a reading.

His figures seem assembled rather than born. Breasts become bodies or feet, faces sprout elongated noses and beaks, limbs turn into tails, wings or serpents. Vast buttocks, curling spirals, staring eyes, smiling suns and strange mechanical devices recur throughout the imagery. The resulting creatures can be comic, threatening, absurdly dignified or frankly erotic, sometimes all four at once.

The selection here brings together examples of his fantastical hybrids, from elongated, animal-headed figures and bizarre contraptions to more overtly erotic imagery, demonstrating how Schröder-Sonnenstern’s work sits so intriguingly between surrealism, eroticism, fantasy and satire.