André Thomkins

André Thomkins is renowned as an artist treating imagery, forms and materials as well as language in playful and experimental ways. His mastery of the classical visual art media was unparalleled, yet he also experimented with different techniques and materials. Within Thomkins’s oeuvre, his works of the 1950s in particular are characterised by a pronounced love of experimentation. During this period, he developed his Lackskins by ‘painting’ with gloss paint on water. He had stumbled across this special technique by chance: cleaning his paint brushes in water, he noticed that the gloss paint he had used left a film on the surface that formed an image. He began deliberately manipulating that floating film of paint and eventually lifted the resulting image from the water with a sheet of paper, achieving ‘something planetary, very light and fluctuating’ (André Thomkins). This wonderful book, André Thomkins: Lackskins is the first comprehensive presentation of these beautiful works.

Text in English & German.