Marie Krösche

Born in 1921 to a family of modest means in northeastern Germany, Marie Krösche and her family endured various hardships during the second world war. From 1937 to 1940 she worked as a technical drafter and graphic artist in the shipbuilding operations of the German Works AG in Kiel, where she also met her husband, the engineer Walter Krösche and, through him, learned about the work of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy. For 7 months in 1940-41 she attended the Munich Art Academy of Atelier Maxon. Moving to Hannover in 1943, Marie began a small artisan craft shop and soon came to be influenced by the arts and crafts teachers at the Hannover Waldorf School. In 1954 at age 33 Marie, Walter, and their two daughters moved to Cologne, where she began to work educationally/artistically with residents of a children’s home as well as undertake further study of anthroposophy. In 1961 she met the painter Gerard Wagner in Dornach, Switzerland and studied painting with him. When in 1973 her family moved to Eckwalden near Bad Boll, Marie was able to develop her own sculptural artistic activity, working primarily in clay and to research the relations of Rudolf Steiner’s indications for the art of sculpture with the “sculptural” principles of living plant forms with friends at the nearby WALA plant medicine laboratories., where she also taught sculpture courses for the medical staff and began to exhibit her work.  This fruitful work continued until 1995 when she had a stroke and moved into a care facility. There she was able to continue her sculptural research and in 2002 at age 81 wrote her first book (in German) based on this research, The Double-Curved Surface as Simplest Archetype of Life. This was followed by 3 further books, including The Hidden Metamorphosis of 2013. Completed shortly before her death that year, each well-illustrated text sharing the discoveries she had made working with the artistic expressions of living natural forces in clay modeling.