Tomas Schmit
Bald ist wieder Schneckentreffen
22.01. – 05.03.2017

Tomas Schmit (1943-2006) is one of the pioneers of the Fluxus movement. Through Nam June Paik, whom he met in 1961, he got to know George Maciunas and the first Fluxus activities. In 1962 he took part in the performance Neo-Dada in Music, organized by the Düsseldorfer Kammerspiele, as well as the Parallel Performances of Newest Music in Amsterdam, and developed his own actions such as the “cycle for water buckets (or bottles)”. He subsequently took part in most of the European Fluxus festivals, which took place in Copenhagen, Paris, Düsseldorf, London and Berlin, and in 1964 organized the much-discussed Festival of New Art at the Technical University in Aachen. With his activities during this period, Tomas Schmit played a key role in shaping the questioning of bourgeois art and the approaches to a new aesthetic. His correspondence with George Maciunas meant that a theoretical debate on the political and aesthetic ideas of the Fluxus era became possible.

In addition to the actions, Tomas Schmit also worked with language and text and began to draw at the end of the 1960s. Over the course of around four decades, he created a large number of individual drawings, editions, original reproductions of drawing series, books, texts and a film entitled “e-constellations”. In terms of content, he dealt with questions such as “how does a chameleon know what color it should be?” or “can people think”, mostly observations and phenomena from evolution, brain and behavioral research or perception and linguistic logic. Tomas Schmit’s artistic reflections were not only highly recognized in the art world through solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Hamburg (1977), the Kölnischer Kunstverein (1978), the Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne and New York (1986 and 1994), the DAAD Galerie Berlin and the Sprengel Museum Hannover (1987), the Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (1997) and posthumously at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg (2007), as well as his participation in documenta 6 in Kassel (1977). Renowned scientists also paid him respect. For example, in 1990 the cyberneticist Prof. Dr. Braitenberg recommended Tomas Schmit’s book “Erster entwurf (einer zentral ästhetik)” to “physicists and other beginners” in a review in the specialist journal “Spektrum der Wissenschaft” as an “introduction to brain science”. In this respect, Tomas Schmit is also one of the most prominent pioneers in the relationship between fine art and science, which is currently enjoying a revival.

Tomas Schmit’s last solo exhibition took place during his lifetime in 2005 at the Kunstverein Bremerhaven. Twelve years later, the Kunstverein is once again presenting an exhibition of his work, which was put together by the Lingen Art Gallery to mark the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death and will travel to the Ludwig Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen following the presentation in Bremerhaven. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven will be supplemented by a new room in the Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven with works by Tomas Schmit from the Kunstverein collection.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.