Photo credit: Jakub Freter
German artist Thomas Wachholz (b.1984) explores meanings and associations in the formal characteristics of mundane objects. Using the visual style and ideological foundations of Pop Art, Wachholz creates paintings that appropriate elements of matchboxes and matchbooks. Gathered over the years in hotels, restaurants, gas stations, cinemas and bars, the matchboxes act as ciphers, shifting the artist’s perception from the object to a specific place and time.
Wachholz’s formal abstractions are imbued with coded meanings. By removing information on the original shape and composition of a matchbox, he frees the imagery from its original context, elevating everyday objects to the realm of symbol. He creates a dense visual net of formal traces and personal memories, structured through opaque colour fields, where iconic symbols like stars or clouds and grids are contoured by geometric outlines. With their bright colours and clean lines, his conceptually playful paintings reveal ironic connections between both form and function, and sign and signified.
Wachholz 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. His work has further been exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach (2014, 2015) and Art Basel (2021) .
Solo exhibitions include Soft Painting, Galeris Lange + Pult, Zurich (2018); Books and Boxes, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); CAPRI, Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany, (2019); and Allumettes Amorphes, Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Paris, (2020).