THOMAS WACHHOLZ
Art Antwerp 2022
December 15 – December 18, 2022
For Art Antwerp 2022, Nino Mier Gallery presents a new series of red phosphorous and acrylic landscape paintings by Cologne-based artist Thomas Wachholz.
Through the new series, Wachholz explores conceptions of escape and leisure within his abstract compositions. Each work condenses an entire landscape to a restricted number of colors and shapes. Experimenting with scenery found on vacation postcards—with mountain ranges, beaches, and sunset views transformed into simplified, geometric abstractions—the series develops Wachholz’s formal repertoire characterized by opaque color fields and iconic symbols.
The works for Art Antwerp also expand upon Wachholz’s continued interrogation of how mundane objects can become fraught with personal memory and material history. For years, Wachholz’s paintings have appropriated the formal layouts and functions of matchboxes and matchbooks. Gathered in places like hotels, restaurants, gas stations, cinemas, clubs, and company lobbies, the colorfully designed boxes are now far less commonplace than they once were. Like postcards, which have now been largely supplanted by photos taken on our cell phones, matchboxes are charged with a potent nostalgia—both a nostalgia for the specific time and place one might have collected the object; and a nostalgia for the quickly fading era in which these souvenirs were more widespread.
Each painting in this series includes a striking surface, produced through the artist’s application of red phosphorus. The phosphorus grid, which almost disappears between the composition of the paintings and its geometric lines, symbolizes the potential for viewers to truly “activate” the paintings through their personal associations and memories.
Thomas Wachholz (b. 1984, Germany; lives and works in Cologne) studied under Katharina Grosse and Marcel Odenbach at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries worldwide, such as Kunstverein Heppenheim; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Wentrup Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Lange + Pult, Zurich; Ung5, Cologne; Nymphius Projekte, Berlin; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; Raebervon Stenglin, Zurich and An der Schanz 1A, Cologne.