The Day After

What interests me is the mysterious element that really does exist in nature, sometimes the most commonplace objects and situations—that magic moment that makes an unexplainable experience linger in your memory.
—Werner Groshans
     
Werner Groshans moved with his family from Germany to the United States at the age of thirteen and began his studies at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art a year later. As a young adult during the Great Depression, he participated in the Works Progress Administration Easel Project for two years.

By the early 1960s his artwork began to gain recognition, and in 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Groshans often worked from his memory of real places seen in nature, but his strange juxtapositions of objects and figures led American Art scholar William Gerdts to describe his style as “Mysterious Realism.”