André Thomkins
Behaviour

Surrealist artists like Duchamp, Ernst and Klee influence André Thomkins’s interest in experimental art practice and performance. Our rare early monotype work from 1957 shows a surrealist subject which reminds us of Ernst's frottage works. As well, Thomkins’s ‘Jungfernfahrt-Stapellau’, of 1975, depicts a boat on some plane, littered with various figures, some seemingly floating heads, attached to various objects and sometimes striking classical poses. Thomkins makes inventive play with perspective and relationships between certain objects.

Presented here, his work varies across paper and performance, and throughout we see an accurate and innovative handling of words and letters. Part of this exhibition, Thomkins’s 1984 'Weitermalen! herr ein spatz irrt / Konzertante Lesung für 70 Klappstühle’ – his last and most important performance piece – requires players to put an equal number of anagram cards into the two little boxes before alternately placing them side by side to form an arbitrary poem.