Thomas Grünfeld

Thomas Grünfeld was born in 1956 in Opladen, Germany; he lives and works in Köln. Grünfeld’s entire production is positioned between familiar and foreign, natural and unnatural, true and plausible. This is how the artist’s work is placed on the crest between what appears recognizable and what is unknown. From this attitude, crosses arise between animals that do not exist and works in felt that rise to the pictorial dimension without being painted. Thomas Grünfeld is best known for his Misfits - sculptures made from taxidermied animals and deriving from the northern European tradition of the Wunderkammer and the German vernacular culture. Grünfeld animals, however, subvert the typically scientific nature of taxidermy and instead represent fictional creatures that evoke proverbial battles between real and imaginary, good and evil. The felt works highlight the artist’s ability to identify typical images (generally landscapes and objects of common use) and to re-propose them with a poetic and pictorial key without painting them, using a traditional material (felt) and a technique of “cut and paste ”typical of the visual arts of the 20th century.