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Tiegemstraat 6A
8553 Otegem
Belgium

Thomas Kratz - Jump to First

Los Angeles: carefree, relaxed and hedonistic? Or more like a major capital city polluted by car exhaust gases where people live in their own bubbles? The truth is somewhere in between. German artist Thomas Kratz immersed himself for three months. The creative explosion that that entailed is soon to be seen at Deweer Gallery, during his second solo exhibition in Otegem.

Los Angeles fueled Thomas Kratz's desire to draw. On handmade, pastel-coloured Japanese paper or on local paper supports. And almost always on a small size. Striking is his childlike, naive signature. His style is semi-figurative, simple and light, and consists of cheerful colours, elegant curls and primary shapes. Sometimes innocent, like a little heart or a cloud, sometimes sexually tinted. But always playful, and with a nod to toilet graffiti. The drawings are like a slippery fish in an aquarium. They have no narrative, the real meaning always escapes us.

The sprawling metropolis also gave Thomas Kratz a fresh look and the right tone to finish his paintings in his studio in Berlin. It is noteworthy that the artist starts from coloured supports, as he also does for his drawings. And he experiments with oil paint for the first time - in addition to gouache, aluminum paint, ink and spray paint, which we have seen in his earlier work. The romantic touch of and the possibilities of texture created with oil paint attract him.

For Thomas Kratz, drawing and painting is like inhaling and exhaling. A necessity. An energy. A continuous search for an answer to his starting point, namely the material and the colour of the support. And that answer is vital, transparent and free.

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