Thomas Kaminsky

In 1998 there were retrospectives of his woodcuts in Kassel, Wuppertal and 'Between Concrete and Utopia' at Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders in Bergisch Gladbach. Kaminsky was subsequently commissioned to make artworks for the residence of the German ambassador in Beijing. Many of his works concern the period before and after the Russian Revolution (1917). They explore the possibility of a utopia in which cultural production was allowed to flourish, before the struggles and the tensions of the Soviet era and the Cold War emerged in Russia and its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain. The influence of European Abstract Expressionism circa 1950 permeates his approach as it does the work of German contemporaries Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Kaminsky's works, particularly in his large-scale woodcuts, are populated with symbolic motifs and characters which include Kazimir Malevich's paintings, the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin and the artist himself as a child holding a toy windmill (a surrogate signature). Kaminsky's work is exhibited regularly in Germany and further afield, and can be found in major group exhibitions and museum collections including the contemporary art collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein / and others.

Melanie Wiora is recorded as having studied under Thomas Kaminsky. The recorded working language is German. Work by Thomas Kaminsky is recorded in the collections of Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Berlinische Galerie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Mumok and Kunstraum Buchberg. Distinctions recorded are Rome Prize of the German Academy Villa Massimo.

• Name — Thomas Kaminsky • Born — 1945 • Occupation — Artist