We are proud to announce Square Dance, the first solo exhibition by leading young German artist, Thomas Wachholz. Wachholoz has been exhibited around the world, including Art Basel Miami Beach (2014, 2015) and Art Basel (2021). Wachholz has created a series of works for the exhibition – his first on the continent – and will be in Cape Town for the occasion.
Born in Germany in 1984, Wachholz studied under Masters Katharina Grosse and Marcel Odenbach at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Wachholz explores meanings and associations in the formal characteristics of mundane objects. Using the visual style and ideological foundations of Pop Art, Wachholz creates paintings that appropriate elements of matchboxes and matchbooks. Gathered over the years in hotels, restaurants, gas stations, cinemas and bars, the matchboxes act as ciphers, shifting the artist’s perception from the object to a specific place and time.
Wachholz’s formal abstractions are imbued with coded meanings. By removing information on the original shape and composition of a matchbox, he frees the imagery from its original context, elevating everyday objects to the realm of symbol.
He creates a dense visual net of formal traces and personal memories, structured through opaque colour fields, where iconic symbols like stars or clouds and grids are contoured by geometric outlines. With their bright colours and clean lines, his conceptually playful paintings reveal ironic connections between both form and function, and sign and signified.
