About the exhibition
Thomas Stimm
The Garden
We are pleased to invite you to Thomas Stimm’s exhibition. The artist is presenting new works and a new catalog.
Since the 1980s, the Austrian sculptor Thomas Stimm has been working with plant and water worlds as well as individual flower figures. He alters the colours and proportions of his subjects and places the sculptures in indoor and outdoor spaces. The reduced, minimalist formal language emphasises the inescapable experience of the plant world.
“The man with the head of a flower is perhaps the spiritual entanglement with the nature of a plant. We belong to the same planet, are born and die like them and survive our existence through our offspring. We have a lot in common and my orientation in life has a lot to do with the lives of other creations of nature.”
– Thomas Stimm, quote from the catalogue The Garden
Where an idyll is present, the opposite is often meant in contemporary art. The flowers, the grass, and all the other elements, including the flower man, that Thomas Stimm presents in his exhibition “The Garden” are different. Nothing lurks here. For Stimm, a native of Vienna who moved to the countryside with his parents as a child, nature is the source, not least of all of himself. In a biological sense, but certainly also in a biographical sense. The garden has shaped him; its diversity serves as an example for his work as a sculptor. As in nature, each individual in his work has its own scope, which is reflected in the diversity of his sculptures.
Excerpt from the article “In the Garden” by Christian Hofmann, published in kunst:art Magazine 103 (May/June 2025)