Sonia

Gramatté employed traditional intaglio etching, incising irregular lines into a metal plate before printing onto plain wove paper. The exclusive use of black ink emphasizes stark contrasts, while the rough, spontaneous marks give the composition a dynamic, almost frantic quality characteristic of expressionist visual language merged with the dreamlike ambiguity of magic realism.

The etching emerged from Gramatté’s productive years spent in Berlin, Hamburg, the island of Hiddensee, and later Barcelona, where he responded to his wartime experiences and recurring illness. *Sonia* has remained within the artist’s oeuvre as a representative example of his early‑twentieth‑century printmaking, documented in catalogues of his work and held in collections that focus on German expressionist prints.