THOMAS PALME

New drawings
16.7. - 31.7.2010

Galerie Michael Haas is pleased to present its second exhibition from Thomas Plame (*1967,Immenstadt/Allgäu) with a selection of new, large format (150 x 120 cm) drawings. Whereas his previous exhibition took the form of an expansive installation with hundreds of drawings, here the single work takes centre place. In portraits of well know figures from American and European cultural history – each with an animal head – the artist reflects their life and work above and beyond all conventional thinking.

Thomas Palme’s work can be regarded as an experiment without boundaries, a continually regenerating   inventory of the world.  Portraits of celebrities first appear in 2008. They are part of a body of work that apart from thousands of drawings also includes videos, installations, and performances, which are closely connected to the personality of the highly educated artist. Palme uses the pencil in 13 gradations with both hands and creates works that are technically, formally and contextually highly complex. They span from the fine detailed gesture to an all encompassing blackening of the visual space. Photos often serve Palme as guidelines. He combines the body of his figures (as well as his own) with animals, symbols of transiency or everyday objects.  He always encircles them with an atmosphere of loneliness, madness, injury, death, emerging, and fading.

Thomas Plame grew up in rural Allgäu. After discontinuing his double bass studies, in the 1980s and 1990s he studied art at the Munich Academy as well as in Vienna (under Arnulf Rainer) and in Düsseldorf (under Tony Cragg, amongst others) where he concluded his master studies. Since his artistic emergence at the end of the 1990s, Palme has been using two pencils simultaneously when he draws. Around this time he destroyed all of his previous artistic output. Thomas Palme lives in Allgäu.