Curated by Dagmar Streckel and Friedemann Malsch

The Swiss painter, draftsman, and object maker André Thomkins (1930–1985) was one of the more protean artists of the postwar era. The characteristics of his art, he said, were “metamorphosis, erasing time, banality, wit, precision.” Close in spirit to his friends in the Fluxus movement, with their ironic, playful attitudes, he also possessed a genuinely Romantic feeling for nature and its infinite transformations. Yet those who smile at his witty palindromes in various languages—STRATEGY: GET ARTS, for instance—may miss the point of his elaborately surreal figurative drawings or his process-based abstract paintings, and vice versa. With luck, this grand-scale retrospective will synthesize the many aspects of Thomkins’s complex oeuvre. Travels to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Oct. 19, 2013–Jan. 2014; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria.

— Barry Schwabsky