Thursday, February 4, 2010



Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian sculpture artist most notable for his works of “character heads”. It was around that time, during his 30’s, that he also started having severe hallucinations and dreams of spirits visiting him at night and torturing him. The sculptor once told an author it was his intention to recreate the 64 “canonical grimaces” and was undergoing so much pain during the process that he would pinch his rib in order to relieve that pain. It is now believed that he suffered from undiagnosed Crohn’s disease, but his sculptures seem to depict the story of a shockingly unreal pain both comical and praiseworthy.

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