André Thomkins

André Thomkins (b. 1930, Lucerne – d. 1985, Berlin) combines surrealist impulses, Dadaist language games and experimental openness to create an artistic language that is truly unique. At heart, Thomkins was less a painter than a draughtsman, poet, conceptual and object artist with a penchant for poetic language systems and absurd worlds.

Despite his experimental oeuvre, Thomkins is best known for his drawings. It was only in the last fifteen years that his group of works known as Lackskins was rediscovered; an unusual technique that the two-time documenta participant developed by chance in the 1950s: derived from a bookbinding process, he experimented with dropping lacquer onto a water surface using chopsticks. As in the traditional production of marbled paper, he worked with the resulting colour film, incorporating chance, to finally remove the resulting image from the water with paper.