Thomas Stimm

(Austria) *1948 in Vienna

Visible from afar with its garish colours and white blossoms, Thomas Stimm’s hugely enlarged “Blume” (Flower) reaches high into the sky. Depending on its surroundings – whether a meadow or city concrete – it either towers above its ‘genuine’ smaller relatives, or stands in contrast to urban life. Made of painted aluminium, Thomas Stimm’s “Flower” is typical of the work of this Austrian sculptor, who since the 1980s has concerned himself with the natural world of plants and watercourses, as well as with individual flowers. Alien in both their proportions and colours, their minimal formal language underlines the ineluctably experiential quality of the world of plants. The artist categorically excludes a metaphorical interpretation of his flowers: they don’t stand for anything else, but only for themselves, and should be expressly and unmistakeably seen in terms of this self-referentiality. Following his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Stimm concerned himself in a variety of ways with the question of ‘size’. Thus, for example, he created miniature worlds or large-format ceramics, which sometimes by means of digital techniques were rendered in plastic or aluminium.