Thomas Spoerndle

Born in Akron, OH / Works in NYC

BIO

Things don't exist, only relations. When Thomas reduced down his palette to red, yellow, and blue, it allowed him to treat them as building blocks of larger structures. Circles, oblong triangles, and skewed rectangles march in neat rows from one side of his canvas to another, but when they reach the other side they are no longer what they were before; and even the works themselves transform into snapshots within continuous action when they are seen in a series.

Born in Akron, Ohio in 1984, Thomas Spoerndle moved to New York City in 2007 after earninghis BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 2010 he received his MFA from Hunter College and hassteadily maintained a studio in Long Island City, Queens ever since. Over the years he has exhibited innumerous group and solo exhibitions; most recently at Troppus Projects in Kent OH, the ReinbergerGallery in Cleveland OH and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse NY. His work has also been featuredin publications such as Patron (Dallas), New American Paintings, Maake Mag, the Cleveland Plain Dealerand Artmaze Magazine.

You'll love Thomas if: salt, pepper, and olive oil is all you need to whip up a culinary masterpiece.

"For over a decade I have been exploring the malleable pictorial space of abstract painting, gradually developing a distilled visual language focused on geometric shapes and the primary colors. Utilizing this language, I construct generative systems founded on pattern and repetition to create a sense of visual rhythm that lends itself to fluctuating figure ground relationships and allows me to articulate kaleidoscopic compositional permutations across series of paintings. The active pictorial space that results has led me to using the phonetic spelling frik-shuhn as a descriptive base for the title of my paintings to allude to the dynamic tension created by this interaction of shape and color. In the process of working I begin to form intuitive associations with compositions; these range from bodily relationships and directionality (landscape, compass, aperture) to musical terminology (staccato, polyrhythmic, broken chord). Drawing from the rich history of abstraction as well as the complex nature of human perception, my paintings operate in a meditative space where pragmatism meets subjectivity, coalescing in a way that is both strikingly immediate and deceptively nuanced."