Thomas Wachholz (b.1984, Cologne) is a visual artist who lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
Wachholz’s paintings are intricate visual networks of formal traces and personal memories, structured through opaque colour fields, iconic symbols like stars and clouds, and grids outlined with geometric precision. By exploring the hidden dimensions of everyday materials, Wachholz distills the objects that inspire his work into a restricted palette of colours and shapes.
Many of his works feature striking surfaces created through the application of red phosphorus. At times, this element blankets an entire painting; in others, it takes abstract forms such as suns, radiating vertical lines, or the contours of larger shapes. The phosphorus grid, nearly dissolving into the composition’s geometry, symbolises the viewer’s role in “activating” the paintings through personal associations and memories.
Wachholz’s work examines how mundane objects—such as matchbooks and postcards—become imbued with personal memory and material history. For years, his pieces have appropriated the formal layouts and functions of matchboxes and matchbooks, once ubiquitous souvenirs from hotels, restaurants, gas stations, cinemas, clubs, and company lobbies. Now increasingly rare, these objects, like postcards displaced by smartphone photography, carry a potent nostalgia—both for the specific moments and places in which they were collected and for the fading era in which they were commonplace.
Wachholz studied under Katharina Grosse and Marcel Odenbach at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
His works are held by notable collections and institutions including Deji Art Museum, China, the Marciano Art Foundation, USA, the Kilbourn Collection, South Africa, and the Frost Foundation, USA. Institutional exhibitions include Centre d’Art Contemporain Meymac, Yves Klein Archive, Marciano Art Foundation, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Krefelder Kunstverein, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, and Bundeskunsthalle.
His work has been exhibited widely, and solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany, Wentrup, Berlin, Germany, Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne, Germany, THK Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, Galerie Lange + Pult, Zürich, Switzerland, Ung5, Köln, Germany, Nymphius Projekte, Berlin, Germany, and RaebervonStenglin, Zürich, Switzerland.