André Thomkins (1930 Lucerne –1985 Berlin) weaves together surrealist impulses, dadaist wordplay, and an experimental openness into an artistic language that stands entirely on its own. At heart, Thomkins was less a painter than a draughtsman, poet, conceptual thinker, and object artist with a marked affinity for poetic linguistic systems and absurd worlds.
Despite the experimental range of his œuvre, Thomkins is known above all for his drawings. Only in the last fifteen years has his group of works known as Lackskins been rediscovered – an unusual technique that the two-time documenta participant developed by chance as early as the 1950s. Adapting a method from bookbinding, he began experimenting by dripping varnish from small sticks onto the surface of water. As in the traditional production of marbled paper, he manipulated the resulting film of colour, allowing chance to play its part, before finally lifting the image from the water with a sheet of paper.
The Lackskins thus embody both a surrealist urge to explore the generative potential of materials and a deliberate artistic intervention. The formations that emerged, reminiscent of fantastical landscapes and figures, were simultaneously Thomkins’s contribution to the debates on abstraction within the artistic avant-garde of his time. Mostly, though not exclusively, abstract, and executed either in grisaille or in strikingly vivid hues, these works display combed, swirling effects akin to marbled endpapers. Yet instead of the characteristic regularity of traditional marbling, Thomkins created tempestuous, unpredictable, dynamic compositions. A curious consequence of their inherent instability is that they appear as uncontrolled as the weather, and yet, in their complexity, could not possibly have arisen by chance alone.
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