Encounter (Nun and Man in Black), c. 1925

Two hooded figures meet in a barren landscape. The encounter seems to have been sudden and unexpected, as the figures appear to be frozen at a certain distance from one another. This impression is heightened by the paint application: The contrast between opaque and hazily transparent watercolors conveys a sense of weightiness and foreboding. The artist Wilhelm Thöny (1888–1949) created a strange intermediate world between reality and visions. This watercolor fits in with the artist’s works created in the 1920s, which are all characterized by a penchant for uncanny and grotesque depictions, and for symbolic interpretations of the world and the self, much like the works of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Alfred Kubin (1877–1959).

AK, 2021