Thomas Kaminsky

Pictures, Objects and Murals

March 17 until May 27, 2007

"Pure painting" as a gesture that captures the world. Works by Thomas Kaminsky at the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in NeuenhausAnyone sitting at the reading table in the Kunstverein gallery these days is actually sitting in the middle of a huge painting. The artist Thomas Kaminsky has painted the walls monochrome in various colours, whereby the characteristic style can still be read as a painting gesture. The result is a bright spatial structure that exerts a real pull on the visitor and draws him involuntarily into the "picture".

Colour intervention could be called the effect of this work in and on space, which is part of the exhibition opened on Friday evening with works by the painter Thomas Kaminsky, who now lives in Vienna. With the artist, who was born in Dresden in 1945 and studied as a master student under Professor Hann Trier at the HfbK Berlin (West) from 1970 to 1976, the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim is continuing its "Painting" program, which was started in 1996 and is closely oriented to contemporary art. This outstanding gallery series has already featured such diverse artists as Michael Bette (1998), Nino Malfatti (2000), Phil Sims (2001) and Megan Craig (2005).
With Thomas Kaminsky, an artist can now be discovered in Neuenhaus until May 27 who has derived his mature position from the field of tension between informal painting of the 1950s and abstract expressionism. Kaminsky's pictorial system of Informel, which was primarily developed from the gestural brushstrokes, and the monochrome colourfulness of Abstract Expressionism led him over many years of aesthetic experimentation and artistic questioning to a completely independent and consistent stance in non-objective painting, which today makes him a renowned representative of classical contemporary art and "pure painting".
While Kaminsky shows himself from a constructive side with his aesthetic intervention in the Neuenhauser room architecture, he captivates the other part of the gallery with artistically developed and completed positions from the Informel. On display here are current oil, acrylic or pastel paintings, a room-sized hand drawing on the ceiling or an original ink drawing that Kaminsky had brought into the picture with the rotating movements of his "painting machine" - an electric toothbrush on wheels.
Kaminsky himself sets his pictorial symbols from a qualitatively sophisticated and restrained colour palette with scriptural movements as free and authentic gestures. What initially conquers the picture surface quite unfiltered and spontaneously and seeks to define the pictorial space, however, fits into compositional structures in accordance with the artist's ordering creative will. From this constantly corresponding interrelation of an emotional, processual expression and a formal aesthetic systematization arises the power that turns abstract painting into art. Kaminsky's works are all pictorial microcosms full of poetry, which have an extremely exciting and dynamic life of their own. The works become narrative for those who engage with the painterly flow and follow it into the aesthetic order of the pictorial elements. These works fascinate and win over with their generous gesture of embracing and grasping the world - it is probably this light attitude with which Kaminsky himself confronts the world. By Thomas Kriegisch
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

The exhibition is supported by the city of Neuenhaus and the state of Lower Saxony.