Thomas Lohmann, born in Zwickau in 1954 fled the GDR to West Germany in 1974. In Cologne, where he lives and works now, he studied free painting at the University of Applied Arts.
In the time that followed he freed himself from the impact of National Arts being practised in the GDR by learning from great models as Dürer, Holbein, as well as from the great models of the Italian High Renaissance area and its history. This he did on numerous study trips and more from 1980 onwards until today.
Just to mention a few of the trips and visits in Italy: Florence, Pisa, Tarquina, Naples and Palermo;
Later he visited in France historical important places as: Oradur-sur-Glanes, la Coupole, Natzweiler-Struthof, Alsace and places in Normandy, Britanny as well as in Germany: Berlin and its surroundings, Weimar and Buchenwald.
In the paintings Thomas Lohmann emphasises the human characters and he is convinced, that human attitudes don’t change and happen everywhere at any time. You cannot deny the influence of the Renaissance area but what you see here is a powerfully and individually developed authentic painting.
He refined the techniques of his paintings as oil on wax, on canvas, on wood and keeps the practised realism working with models shown in the recent paintings in his individual artistic language.
Bringing together a small selection of works created within a period of 10 years and representing the artist’s maturity process and development, the paintings, it is in no way a retrospective, centre and focus on some thematic series.
With the shown works Thomas Lohmann appears as a figurative artist who masters both the technical tools and the aesthetic resources of the old masters, developing an artistic, individual language and by looking out through a hypothetic perforated time line now, suspected and ever-lasting meanings are turned out at any time and at any place. As to Thomas Lohmann, only the style is changing and there is never one true meaning.