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the war she married and settled in Hamburg, where she looked after the family home and painted.
The note also tells us that she had frequent stays in psychiatric clinics. She died in Hamburg in
1992.
    It is highly likely that Köhler produced these extant artworks during, or subsequent to, times
she was hospitalised. There are, to be sure, certain affinities with the work of another German
artist and contemporary who also experienced psychic trauma, Unica Zürn. It is possible that the
body of work that we have survived because it had been in the possession of one of her doctors.
These are not ‘psychotic’ images, though. While the works are clearly redolent of visionary
experience, they are the product of an assured hand, and do not have that sense of visual and
lingual disintegration and incoherence that characteristically accompanies the journey into, and
experience of, full-blown psychosis. Rather, they seem to operate more as reports back from
experiences of some psychic elsewhere. Given her intense, liminal encounters with other realms,
it is fitting that her work is included in two important collections devoted to visionary creativity,
the Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg and the College of Psychic Studies, London.
    Köhler/Sieg-bert illustrates the liminal moment of crossing onto the other side in one of her
most figurative images, The Intermediate Realm? (fig.9). “From a spiritual point of view,” she
writes, this intermediate zone is the “realm that people are still searching for and slowly
approaching after their death.” A search which is, in itself, not solitary, but “community work.” Her
sense of psychic liminality is nowhere more clearly stated than in a note on the verso of The
Poem of the Sphere (fig.10):

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