In his works, Thomas Arnolds explores central questions of painting, playing with principles of repetition and variation, reduction and redundancy, accumulation and concentration. Parts, either blurred or finely painted, often contrast with other distinctive gestures. Materiality, surface, and structure are the leading parameters in Arnolds’s investigation of painterly processes. While he creates plasticity through impasto paint application, in his two-dimensional oil paintings, he negates central perspective and therefore spatial representation. At the same time Arnolds also always understands painting as a site of confrontation.

After exploring painterly concerns in his early years using the primary colors red, yellow, and blue, as his "kitchen paintings" exemplify, the artist eventually expanded his palette and experimented with these in monochromatic works, e.g. in white, nude-colored, and blue. Aspects of the symbolism of colors interest him as much as metaphysical phenomena. Arnolds demonstrates a variety of motifs, including not only interiors, everyday-objects, or bonsai arrangements, but also architectural subjects – whether in the form of Clinker brick Expressionisms or column bases, the latter relating to the classical order of columns and its neoclassical references, thereby revealing moments of inflection, bending, and stretching. One thing is certain: in his painterly exploration of nature, culture, and architecture, Arnolds creates his own blueprint.    Read More