UTOPIA | THOMAS RIESS

THOMAS RIESS works at the intersection of painting and mixed media. Riess’s subject matter is people and their perceptions of time and reality in our rapidly changing multimedia world. His dense, atmospheric paintings pose questions about the meaning of existence. In his mixed media works, Riess processes imagery taken from everyday media and moves it into a changed context. His large-scale paintings feature dramatic representations of single individuals – mostly without faces – surrounded by light and darkness. The focus is both on the individual and on the space around them. Even in his landscapes, realistic painting is exposed as an illusion, and concepts such as perception and interpretation are brought to the foreground. Riess thus moves between reality and illusion, experience and recollection, the foreseeable and the unforeseeable.