Andre Thomkins

Published Categorised as Art & Design, Liechtenstein, Popular Posts, Travel No Comments on Andre Thomkins

andre thomkins

When I was in Liecht­en­stein, I went to the Modern Art museum there. I was really impressed with the qual­ity of the museum, espe­cially in such a small coun­try. They had a special exhib­i­tion about Swiss artist André Thomkins (whose estate had donated his works to the museum). I hadn’t come across him before, but I really enjoyed what I saw (and his large array of German puns), espe­cially the short film where he was talk­ing and demon­strat­ing how he made marbled paint­ings by float­ing lacquer on top of water, some­thing he star­ted exper­i­ment­ing with after wash­ing a brush he’d been paint­ing furniture with.

thomkins art 1

Watch­ing a man drop­ping oil paint onto a bathfull of water accom­pan­ied by space noises is strangely relax­ing- you can see a video here, the website wouldn’t let me embed it. He seemed to turn his hands to anything that took his fancy, from palin­drome surreal­ist poems to homemade instru­ments to intric­ate ink draw­ings. I imagine he was having lots of fun. I really enjoyed the bad German puns in the writ­ten work, but obvi­ously they won’t do anything for you if you don’t speak the language.

thomkins art 2

The gallery has this video where they show you some of the exhib­i­tion. Strangely they don’t show that much of the artwork though. The video’s in German too. You do see some of the “Bureau­crat­ic Draw­ings” made of rubber bands though.

(All images from Haus­er & Wirth)

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