Anke Lohrer approaches the complex subject of fear with an apparently arbitrary collection of associations. The artist is concerned with the meaning and origins of fear but above all with the question of how it is conveyed to the individual through socialisation.The substantive point of departure for her work is the treatment and description of fear in fairy tales. One of the media she uses as a mean s of artistic expression is the artist´s book. She works with large sketchbooks, which she transforms into objects. The pages are full of drawings,painted elements, quotations and original texts. They exhibit a broad range of materials , architectural and sculptural cut-out pieces, sewn leaves as well as figures and symbols resembling bookmarks. These objects are not artistá books in traditional sense, as collections of illustrations based on literary sources. They are works of art in their own right. As in a book of „bedtime stories“, Lohrer descibes her essential thoughts about fear in The Book of Fear. The viewer is encouraged to become actively involved in the work, and must decode it. Generally speaking , these artist´s books appeal to the sensory aspects of perception and the viewer´s powers of association. The viewer is given something to feel , to read, to lookat, and assumes the role of an explorer and researcher. Like explosive short stories, the visual worlds and printed elemenst are superimposed and arranged  in sequence and vacillate between humorous allegories, penetrating yet puzzling passages of text and disturbing pictorial images. As if  in a scurrilous dream, the viewer experiences a fantastical world, moving fromthe fear of flying to the „fraidy cat“ to a couple and ist fear of commitment, from the Fear of loneliness, childhood fears and classical neurosis straight into the darkness, the black void. What lies in wait behind it? It is a wolf, the threat to all fleh and blood?
The wolf as a symbol of evil, the creature that devours the granmother in little red riding hood? Fear is intensified in the darkness by the imagination, just as in the fairy tale in which the good always wins but must also be sacrified for the sake of a happy end. In the Book of Fear , Anke Lohrer writes:“ The true fairy-tale charakter need to experience fear, for it does not die...“
According to Prof. Dr. Rölleke, the world of Grimm´s Fairy Tales is a fundamentally optimistic one. Because the main protagonist does not experience a true maturation process, the full menaing of live and death remains alien to it.
Here we recognize a first reversal of the concept of fear as a negative phenomen-namely in the capacity to take advantage of fear, to learn from it and to reflect upon ist effects. Fear makes life turbulent , but it can also motivate and lead to knowledge, regardless of ist nature.

In the multipart wall installation Fear, Anke Lohrer explores different forms of physical expression that are trigered by strong feelings of fear. Small clay sculptures engage in dialogue with drawings on wood and pictorial medallions painted with ink and attaches by delicate threads. The animal that cringes and draws in ist tail out of fear or the woman who crouches in terror in a corner-these are images and situations that exemplify the physical expression of fear.

The incredible magnitude of ist emotion or state of mind is difficult to nearly impossible to grasp in words.It is magnifested physically; it flows outward in a different way, but not in form of language, Anke Lohrer points out. She cites Per Kirkeby in this context:“I think there are things that cannot be explored with words ; they cannot be explained or communicated through linguistic menas, at least not in their entire profundity. Language has a simplifying function, and that is propably necessary in order to enable us to keep on living. Thus there is something else beyond language, a realm of unprocessed feelings.
Anke Lohrer articulates her ideas in poetic visual worlds: wishes and day-to-day absurdities, questions about social phenomena, interpersonal relationships- in short , the dynamics of life, the very thing that enables the human being to carry on, namely the imagination.

Christoph Kohl. M.A., 2007