Thomas Wachholz | Square Dance

THK Gallery presents a solo exhibition by leading young German artist, Thomas Wachholz, exhibiting for the first time on the continent.

Thomas Wachholz 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.

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.