Thomas Kolding

Educated at the Royal Danish Design School 1993

Danish painter and stage designer with more than 40 exhibitions and 70 plays in Denmark, Sweden and Germany.

ABOUT

Pain, love, hate, presence, primal power, physicality filled with the hope for something better.

It has taken me a long time to accept that my works – unlike many other painters – vary in expression, sometimes almost from one painting to the next.

Just until it came to me that if you collect my paintings in groups – then they are not different.
In another way i am curious and experimented within my expression – from work to work.

But one thing is certain: There is no doubt that I paint figuratively! People… in different contexts. People are deeply interesting!

My works taken together are full of pain, love, hate, presence, primal power, physicality and filled with the hope for something better.

I have been told that my works scratch the viewer from the inside of the brain, not from the outside.

They go into the soul and retrieve images from first-hand experiences where it has cost blood, sweat and tears – but also where there has been beauty and failure. Where there has been something worth fighting for.
At the same time, vulnerability and exposure as well as a strong urge for honesty are also present in my pictures and again for some of them – humour!

Experience Thomas Kolding’s works in the studio

Contact for a visit

+45 26 19 97 60

art@thomaskolding.com

Reviews from art shows

Review from the exhibition “Escape the Nest”

Hannover Allgemeine Zeitung by Kristina Tieke

“The Dane Thomas Kolding studied at the Danish School of Design 1988-93. Now the Hanoverian Galerie Holbein4 is arranging his first solo exhibition in Germany under the title “Escape the Nest”. The attempt to escape the nest and enter the world is Kolding’s artistic theme and also a biographical motive. At the center are female figures in white leotards and underwear, as if posing for training. Their movements seem choreographed. Sometimes they bend in the fetal position, and other times, with their heads thrown back and outstretched arms, they venture an opening towards the world and the partner, which remains a fragmentary hint. Thomas Kolding does not provide secure stability.
The impression of unprotectedness and danger to life is reinforced through the abstract color spaces, which are built up of bright red, orange, black and white horizontal lanes. Traces of drops soften the horizontal lines and draw vertical lines. Often the figures seem to disappear like shadow games behind the color slides, and then they are released again in a white nothing. Thomas Kolding has scratched the tool titles into the painting, “An End has a Start” sounds like one. There is a beginning in every parting.”

From review of winter exhibition in Gallery V58 in Kunstavisen

11, dec. 2012 by Lise Barsøe

… “On the end wall, it is the visual artist Thomas Kolding who dominates with a very large work (Memories III 200×150 cm) flanked by a few smaller ones (Couple Vestfjords 100×100 cm and Remembrance 100×70 cm). Here is passion, where the figures of the present are presented in a cascade of violent movement, and who with reflections and strong brushstrokes make use of the white color that gathers in an orgy of, among other things, dramatic red shades. Yet these images also exude narrative poetry … ”