The German artist Thomas Gatzemeier grew up in Döbeln, a town in Saxony between Leipzig and Dresden, then part of East Germany or the German Democratic Republic. He graduated from the polytechnic high school in Döbeln with an intermediate school leaving certificate and trained as a sign and poster painter, before doing his compulsory military service. After a brief job as a stonemason’s assistant, in 1975 he began studying painting and graphics at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Fine Arts) in Leipzig under Arno Rink and Volker Stelzmann.

From 1980 to 1986 Gatzemeier worked in Döbeln and took on government commissions, but after his brother and sister-in-law were imprisoned for political reasons in 1984, he applied to leave the GDR, and as a result was banned from exhibiting. His application was approved in 1986, and Gatzemeier moved to Karlsruhe to work as a freelance artist. In 1987 he had his first solo exhibition there at the Galerie Paepke, then in 1988 exhibited at the Badischer Kunstverein and at the Galerie Koppelmann in Cologne.

Gatzemeier was heavily influenced by his education at the Academy of Fine Arts, which taught the craft of painting in the old academic tradition and concentrated on the human figure. After a while, though, his figure paintings dissolved into abstraction and later slowly returned to the object, so that by the 2010s he had returned to the cleanly drawn, almost classic, nude as the focus of his work.

More recently he has concentrated on works that question the whole point of art, with thought-provoking juxtapositions of traditional ‘art’ subjects and modern everyday objects.

In 2006 Thomas Gatzemeier moved his studio back to Leipzig, where in 2009 he founded the publishing house and gallery Soll und Haben (‘debit and credit’ in English) to publish his own publications, which include novels, short stories and picture books.

Thomas Gatzemeier’s website can be found here, and the Soll und Haben website here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying nearly all the images.