Charles Adrien Wettach alias Grock - der König der Clowns. Painting

I am a big fan of Helge Schneider. In one of his interviews, he talked about his roots and the clowns that inspired him. Based on this, I started to look into clowns of the past. Some of their stories were very revealing and showed a lot about the times in which they were active. Their performances (if there were still recordings of them) were also very artistic, chaotic or full of slapstick. I sometimes laughed a lot. For me, clowns play a special role in society. Their job is to make people laugh and to pull them out of their everyday lives and forget them for a few hours. They often stand outside the political arena and people tend to know them in the role they embody rather than as the personality behind it. So last year I decided to portray some of these important clowns. Both in their role, but above all the person behind them. I started with the Swiss musical clown Grock alias Charles Adrien Wettach (1880 - 1959). He mastered 15 instruments and spoke 6 languages fluently. He began performing in a circus at an early age and called himself "Grock" from 1910. He became world-famous with his show and his performances in what was then Nazi Germany later earned him harsh criticism. However, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he did not perform for the time being and - unlike Charlie Rivel - there is no evidence of any right-wing sentiment in his work. His autobiography ends with the sentence: "How happy I am to be just a clown!"