From 1957 until 1959 Walter Stöhrer studied together with Horst Antes and Dieter Krieg at the University of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe in the class of HAP Grieshaber. After university the artist decided to live in Berlin. His way of painting, which seemed to be passionately excited and reminded of the "Ecriture automatique" - a favourite painting style of surrealism - made the artist already well-known in the early 1960s, although it also contained figurative elements of surreal origin painted in spontaneous brushstrokes. It was in 1961 when his works were already presented in a first individual exhibition in the basement gallery of the Darmstadt castle. Honoured with the Art Prize of the City of Berlin in 1964, Stöhrer received also different awards for his work in the following years, e. g. the Villa Romana Prize in Florence in 1977. His second individual exhibition took place in the gallery Nächst St. Stefan in Vienna in 1965, followed by exhibitions in Berlin and Stuttgart in 1979 and in the DAAD-Gallery and the Württembergischen Kunstverein in 1980. Stöhrer was offered a guest professorship of one year at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1981. A comprehensive exhibition of his oeuvre was presented in two retrospectives shown in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf and in the Saarland-Museum Saarbrücken in 1984. Since 1986 Stöhrer teaches at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, where his works were again exhibited in the Berlinische Galerie in 1989. Walter Stöhrer died in Scholderup on 10 April 2000.