Opening speech by Bernd Raschke
Mainz, Friday, October 10, 2025, on the occasion of the vernissage at Kunstverein Eisenturm, Mainz.
Dear Thomas Lefeldt, dear Lya Goldner, dear team at Kunstverein Eisenturm, dear art lovers,
The opening here in the rooms of the Eisenturm marks the start of the exhibition “Inside the Artist” by artist Thomas Lefeldt. I am delighted to be able to say a few words about it.How did you feel when you first saw and read the title of the exhibition: “Inside the Artist” – what associations did it bring to mind?
I'll tell you how I felt. To me, the title “Inside the Artist” sounds like an invitation to explore the connection between the two worlds of Thomas Lefeldt, the two worlds that have been and remain equally important to him throughout his life: on the one hand, the world of music – Lefeldt the composer, and on the other, the world of painting – Lefeldt the grounded tactile artist.
Thomas Lefeldt grew up in Hamburg between these two worlds. His mother was a pianist, his father a passionate amateur painter and photographer.
In this environment, his path was predetermined: from 1968, he studied piano at the Hamburg University of Music, then went on to study at the Detmold University of Music, graduating with a piano teaching diploma and concert and soloist exams. At the same time, he had been continuously involved in painting and photography since 1970. Thomas Lefeldt worked as a piano teacher and wrote compositions for piano, chamber music, and orchestra. He could have pursued a career as a musician; he was on the verge of success, so to speak, and had job offers, but he turned them down because he had found a studio again. Thomas Lefeldt told me that painting had always prevented him from pursuing a career as a musician. He didn't become rich from it, but he was always happy with it and, as a result, continues to lead a self-determined life to this day, which is very important to him. I find this attitude deeply impressive because it proves that self-determined happiness, the freedom to follow one's own impulses, and artistic integrity are the truest forms of success.
And now I'll tell you how this title came about. On his Instagram account, Thomas Lefeldt often received comments on his pictures, which he sometimes even used as titles for the pictures because he found them interesting. He generally has a hard time coming up with titles for his pictures, so this was a welcome help. And then someone wrote, in a somewhat critical or negative tone:
“What must be going on inside this painter when he paints such pictures?” Thomas Lefeldt was initially dismayed, but then he said to himself: Actually, that's a good question – and he made the question the title of the picture – “Inside the Artist.” When we think about it, pictures are nothing else: they turn the artist's inner world inside out and make it present.
It is precisely this dichotomy, this tension between the clarity of the motto and the complex essence of his work, that you will later discover with great pleasure as you walk through the exhibition and take in the material and spiritual world of Thomas Lefeldt here in the Eisenturm.
The exhibition includes works on paper, large-format murals, and modular wall installations spanning four decades of his career. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that this compilation is not a classic retrospective. It is not an attempt to show a chronological development. On the contrary: Thomas Lefeldt deliberately brings works that are 40 years old back into the present. He does not focus on his latest productions, even though many new works are included.
His goal is to achieve an overall effect, to create an overarching context. Because the truth is: much of his long-standing work lay hidden in the depths of his archive. He has opened the drawers—and what has come to light shows us that Thomas Lefeldt has continuously reflected on his artistic life throughout his career.
The exhibition is thus rather the living expression of an artist who places the past, the neglected, and the rediscovered in constant dialogue with the present. He invites you to do the same.
For Lefeldt, however, his images were and are never purely abstract. He engages in a kind of color and structure geology in which he pushes the boundaries to the third dimension. Early on, he worked with tar, sand, ash, lava, and dried grass. The colors that appear in the image through oil or acrylic paint are also derived from these earth materials. This strong connection to nature is the foundation of his work. It is evident not only in his preferred colors, but also in his intensive engagement with photography. Lefeldt has created two central groups of works that directly influence his painting: his “wall pictures” and his “pond pictures".
Humans themselves never appear as figures in his works. But through the conscious shaping of the material, which he takes directly from his surroundings and forms into images, humans are ever-present in this visual world—isn't that the essence of “Inside the Artist”?
The beauty of the remote, the unnoticed, continues to fascinate him to this day. Thomas Lefeldt is not only concerned with themes such as transience or decay. He is much more interested in the connections and nature of different structures. He tells the story of a man-made living environment that has been left to its own devices and reclaimed by nature. Although his painting is stylistically in the tradition of Informel, it deliberately maintains a hinted connection to reality. This is indicated by elements such as the right angles of window frames or walls, which penetrate his pictorial composition and thus form a formal framework. They create a subtle but clear anchor between the spontaneous material and the perceived world.
You will see this principle of anchoring in reality repeatedly throughout the exhibition. It is particularly evident in the long-term series “Muri della Maremma.” This monumental series of works refers to early photo series from 2002, inspired by weathered walls and old facades that Thomas Lefeldt discovered in southern Tuscany. To date, the series comprises more than 1,200 square panel paintings of the same format, which can be arranged in any order as a modular wall installation. These miniatures are like kaleidoscopic diaries in which reflections and emotions are recorded over the years. Their creation goes through various stages of development in which form, style, and rhythm are constantly changing. Rarely do they succeed quickly or spontaneously; usually, they are accompanied by an intensive creative process that can take months or even years. Here, too, the factor of time, which is so characteristic of Lefeldt's working method, is worked into the interior of the paintings layer by layer.In this exhibition, Thomas Lefeldt shows us not only what he paints, but also how he sees and feels the world, and how he translates these sensory impressions into his art. “Inside the Artist” invites you to discover the hidden alchemy of art—those decisive moments when ideas and thoughts become matter and the invisible becomes tangible.
I cordially invite you to follow in the footsteps of this color and structural geology for yourself. Take the time to calmly absorb the complexity and timelessness of Thomas Lefeldt's works. Thank you for your attention.Color Traces.
Opening speech by Dr. Antje Lechleiter
Freiburg, on Sunday, October 7, 2018, at the vernissage in the Rebay-Haus Teningen.
"Color traces" is the title of this exhibition by Thomas Lefeldt. In fact, only thin traces of color or rather skins of color lie over his picture carriers. That which in his works stands out from the background in relief is not due to a pastily applied color, but to various types of material. For many decades, Lefeldt has been practicing a kind of colour and structural geology in which he goes to the limits of the third dimension.
As I will explain shortly, he has already worked with tar, sand, ash, lava and dried grass and also the colourfulness that appears in the picture through oil or acrylic paint is derived from these materials. Thus white and black dominate in addition to earth tones, a little green, red, yellow and a little blue are added. This colourfulness, however, is always weakened in its luminosity and thus blends into the circle of natural tones.
The composition "Hekla XI", created 27 years ago, hangs in the hallway as a welcoming picture of the exhibition. At that time his works were still very material-emphasized, this picture consists for example not only of canvas and oil paint, but also of tar, sand and lava. Lefeldt used his various materials to represent what could be done similarly - but not exactly so - with paint. Tar, sand, and lava emphasize the image as a physical, material object, while the painterly and sculptural forms interpenetrate to form an ambiguous and associative image that not only does not want to hide the process of its creation, but itself makes it a theme. Individual forms are not treated independently, but the pictorial structure is seen as a flowing system of overlapping color zones.
Man never appears as a figure in these compositions, but through the use of materials and the formative action of his body, Lefeldt has buried a trace in them and is present with it in his pictorial world.
Then as now, Lefeldt's way of working is oriented to the Informel, but his pictures were never meant abstractly and are not today. The artist has always taken nature as his starting point, and this anchoring is not only evident in his preferred color. Lefeldt has long been intensively involved with photography, creating two groups of works that have directly penetrated his painting. On the one hand, there are photographs of weathered walls and old house facades, which Lefeldt discovered in 2004 in the central Italian Maremma. He was fascinated by the beauty of the unnoticed, the off-beaten, but this photograph was not about aspects such as transience or decay, but about the connections between different structures and their composition. His paintings refer to these aspects, in which his structures are anchored to formal scaffolding, for example right angles such as those of window frames or walls. These elements lead a life of their own in his compositions, but they also hold a delicately floating connection to reality. Therefore, I would describe Lefeldt as a tracker and discoverer whose compositions are owed more to finding than to inventing.
This is also shown by the second photographic starting point of his painting, the so-called "pond pictures", for which he often chose small sections or made macro shots. Even this photographic source material has a strongly abstract character. You can see that he looked through the viewfinder of his camera until things got a secret. The theme of his painting forms itself accordingly object free and refers - without showing its origin - to dynamic processes, to the motif of movement and change itself. Thus the picture becomes a colour landscape whose structure-rich dynamic is sometimes reminiscent of flying over natural space.
So let's sum it up again: Photography and painting on paper are closely connected in this work - materially, but also aesthetically, and they developed organically apart. Here, as there, the artist is not concerned with a depictive procedure, but rather tirelessly seeks structures that carry the aspect of growth, natural form formation and process-like transformation within themselves. His many years of intensive involvement with this theme have led to the fact that he no longer needs photography as a direct starting point. Meanwhile Lefeldt calls up the material for his pictures in his imagination. Thus it is not always possible to distinguish between pure pond and wall pictures, they have mixed into a universally valid visual experience that does not want to commit itself to a binding theme. Lefeldt merely gives impulses and wants to stimulate the viewer's imagination with his designs.
The wall block of 60 small-format, square works from 2018 is impressive. 750 of these small compositions, which Lefeldt also calls "modular wall installations", have been created since 2004/05. They are "miniature paintings", for they are not works of sketch character, but autonomous works of art that have undergone two or three different states during their creation, thereby changing structure, style, and rhythm. They never emerge quickly or spontaneously in a litter, always preceded by an intensive creative process. Layer by layer the time factor is painted into them. Lefeldt sees these works himself as a kaleidoscope of his inner movement, as diaries showing a cosmos of moods and structures.
Since 1970 Thomas Lefeldt has been engaged in painting and photography and at the same time completed piano studies at the Detmold University of Music. He is certainly known to many of you as a musician and composer. Music and painting, however, are treated completely separate from each other and so I would just like to point out that the stubborn and persistent pursuit of quality is an essential characteristic of the artist. Arbitrariness is something that both the musician and the visual artist Thomas Lefeldt deeply reject.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I already mentioned at the beginning that Lefeldt's material pictures go to the limits of the third dimension. So it was a logical step to finally turn to the object. This happened a few years ago, around 2011, Lefeldt began to coat tubes and rods with a thin skin of paint. These painting objects follow closely on from his artistic work and it is impressive with what consistency this artist has remained true to himself over the decades and has thus created a coherent, monolithic oeuvre.
Titisee-Neustadt, on 21st October 2016, at the vernissage in the Kunstforum Hochschwarzwald
How can it happen that someone paints the way you can see it here?
Perhaps because his father is a photographer and landscape painter on the side, and his mother is a pianist? This creative potential was immediately absorbed by mother's milk.
With such a motivated parental home, the Hamburg child picked up a pencil early on or later her father's camera, developed not only paper prints in his own darkroom, but also his artistic ambitions.
Painting, little Thomas drew wondrous map-like drawings, drew away-like lines, rivers meandered across the paper surface, he composed aerial photographs of imagined landscapes, took a bird's-eye view long before humanity was blessed with google earth.
In the 60's he even wrote to the Albanian and Romanian radio whether it was possible to send him topographic maps to draw, which they did promptly and sent him Christmas greetings for years to come as a thank you for his youthful interest.
He would have wanted and been able to become a cartographer.
He became an artist, thank God, musician, pianist in the first instance without ever letting go of the other thing, photography and painting.
He's a seeker and he finds.
As a composer melodies, as a photographer motives, as a painter happiness.
He listens, looks, attunes himself to natural and cultural spaces and takes from this cosmos of the everyday, with trained perception, the excerpt-like motifs which he first captures photographically and which serve him as a free model for his painting. So he is still on a high-altitude expedition, searching for his details in the surroundings of weathered buildings or monetar water surfaces - zooming in at the decisive moment, capturing what he finds worth seeing.
The artist himself: I look at the earth, take photos and think that these are all not yet painted pictures.
The Romanian sculptor Brancusi once said: why should I talk about my sculptures when I can photograph them after all? On the other hand, perhaps a Thomas Lefeldt: what my photographs show, I don't have to talk about, if I can also paint it.
What emerges are no longer merely artistically valuable images of a real world, but real new creations, undiscovered landscapes of inner not outer nature. More sensual than the photographs could ever be, because the dematerialized section is redefined by the painting process, adding a material dimension and transforming itself into a completely independent picture. From the familiar, from what has already been seen, emerges what has not yet been seen. It is that which constitutes an artistic process, where what exists is tied to, but at the same time penetrates into the realm of what does not yet exist, what is still unknown, what has not yet been seen, in order to participate in an act of creation and, at the same time, to be led to oneself anew.
A real cultural deed, then.
But what does that have to do with you?
As viewers, they now have a similar opportunity to immerse themselves in these topographical pictorial works and to discover their own, very personal excerpts by wandering through these landscapes and architecturally seeming motifs, in order to acquire the pictorial works shown here as active creative partners, either ideally or also please materially.
Take a look at the whole exhibition, the artist has done his thing, now it's your turn, your attention completes the artistic process, let yourself be touched by the pictures, they become a part of them and vice versa. They need them and vice versa.
That's why you might be here.
And that is why the works shown at such a place in nature are so meaningful with them as observers.
Franz Grillparzer once put it this way: art relates to nature like wine to grapes - so we toast:
Of course to the art and of course to the artist.
Every now and then you meet them, painters who are also musicians, musicians who paint. Reflexively, comparisons are made, searching glances and pointed ears: Isn't there something of the music of this - the same - person in this picture? If one hears the picturesque ones from the musical compositions?
Thomas Lefeldt, born 1949 in Hamburg, studied piano and composition at the Musikhochschule Detmold before coming to Freiburg in 1980 to work as a piano teacher and freelance painter. He is a musician and painter, and he does not love the search for comparisons, parallels and focal points. Music is one thing, painting another.
Especially in the bright pictures a next step is easily done. Sandy dunes with grasses moved by the wind quickly lift the images beyond the structure to the elements: Air and water are in the pictures; and just as the elements can be transformed into each other according to Aristotle, tar, ash and the multicoloured lava have earthy quality and yet still carry the fire within them.
Lefeldt has found the four elements in the concentration on tiny sections of the earth's surface.
Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology Freiburg 1988
The painter Thomas Lefeldt
This can look incredibly powerful, as on the large-format "Torso I", in which the black centre is stretched like a torn body inside by the surrounding white into the picture corners. It can appear precious and sensual, as in the small poetic collages of gauze stripes, fluttering white and subtle red dots, or irritatingly ambiguous.
Black, not as a cover, but as a contrast to surfaces and forms, which eventually culminate in a crass white, also dominates the work of Thomas Lefeldt, who presents his paintings in the old Protestant Church in Kirchzarten. Coming from music, the medium of painting opens up new possibilities of expression for him. Detached from figurative models, he has committed himself to the primacy of colours, which he limits in his selection, but which he almost increases to explosive effect through his work with tense contrasts and a "wild" painting technique.
The combination of materials, from oil to acrylic paint, pencil, chalk to bitumen as well as the paper-covered canvas give the paintings a fascinating, sometimes disturbing character.
Thomas Lefeldt exhibits at the Kunstverein Kirchzarten
Black, white and grey shades dominate Lefeldt's pictures. Only from time to time ochre, brown or red shine through, sometimes the grey has a bluish hue. The artist usually works with acrylic paints, which he combines with pigments, oil paints, lead, chalk or bitumen. Almost all paintings have a moving surface structure, which is created by gluing on materials such as fabric, cords or buttons or by applying and modelling thick layers of paint. The thirteen exhibited works of art appear predominantly gloomy: heavy black surfaces press on the lighter part of a picture, bright white stands out aggressively between two dark surfaces, confused lines cover like spider arms or threatening rivulets, but also like roots or paths in a landscape viewed from above the sharply contrasted or blurred differently shaded patches of colour merging into one another.
That the paintings are not intended to express anything that can be grasped conceptually, that the painting process itself is the The composition of an intuition is the result of an almost incomprehensible subjective experience at the moment of creation, which makes the description of the paintings more difficult. The viewer of Thomas Lefeldt's paintings is always tempted to read out familiar forms (a tree, a human figure, an animal's head) and, through his own conceptual interpretation, to take away from the painting a meaning that the painter did not, or at least did not explicitly put into it. But perhaps this is precisely the attraction of this painting: it is difficult for the artist to find out what he is looking for in the picture, and each observer can get out of the picture what he is looking for and is thus stimulated to his own creativity when looking at it.
