Imrich Tomáš

Imrich Tomáš was born in Slovakia and showed exceptional artistic talent even as a child. However, his artistic urge to only ever interpret the world in paintings and sculptures made him an outsider in a society characterised by socialism, in which there was no perspective for his aesthetic viewpoint and the freedom of his artistic work. Faced with the impossibility of uniting his life and his art in his home country, the then 21-year-old applied to leave the country for West Germany in 1969. He came to West Berlin and initially earned his living as a labourer. In his spare time, he took painting lessons and met the emerging young Berlin art scene in Kreuzberg pubs. There, Imrich Tomas found access to literature, philosophy, art and painting history – and contact with artists from all over the world. In 1974, Imrich Tomas successfully applied to the Berlin University of the Arts. In 1980, he completed his studies in the ‘Fine Arts’ department with a master student award. Imrich Tomas has been a German citizen since 1982 and lives and works in Berlin.

Each individual work of art exudes the uncompromising urge for freedom, the depth and fullness of an art that is always one step ahead of the world. As the artist’s experiences build up layer by layer, Tomas combines the individual layers of material into a completely new, large whole.

Delicate webs of flax and hemp appear surprisingly stable on closer inspection, while lacquered surfaces in rich colours, thought to be unyielding, are elegant, even light components in each object’s own landscape of shapes. Whether openwork, interwoven, spindly structures reveal the development of the picture down to the first, birth layer

or whether the surface appears closed, does not detract from its depth. Layers of colour and material build rhythmically on one another and become a powerful overall event of structures, colours, materials, transparency and depth.

The compositions of hemp, synthetic resin, lacquer, string, paper and air merge into ever new worlds of their own and transport the viewer into a previously unknown, magical dimension.

unknown, magical dimension.