Thomas Nölle (Soest, Germany, December 2, 1948 – Badalona (Barcelona), Spain, June 3, 2020) was a visual artist. He was born in the German city of Soest, in Westphalia. Nölle's experimental drive facilitated his work in various disciplines and with a diversity of techniques, including photography, painting, collage, sculpture, assemblage, environment art, mixed media, video, installation art, action art and interventions in public space.
Life
In 1970, during his university studies, he moved to Bonn, where he had his first artist studio while studying Education at the Universität Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms. Starting in 1988 he made frequent trips to Barcelona and set up his studio in the city's Gothic Quarter in 1989. In 2010 he moved his studio to Vilassar de Mar (Barcelona), while throughout his lifetime he lived for various periods in Brazil, Portugal and Germany.
Art historian Jürgen Pech wrote that "Thomas Nölle belongs to two cultures, European and non-European, a circumstance that is evident in his work."Jürgen Pech, Thomas Nölle: Gemälde, Ölzeichnungen, Raumplastik, in: Westfalenpost, 9.10.1986.
Work
Thomas Nölle's earliest experience with art was through photography. He had his first exhibition of photography at the age of 15, and from the mid-70s onwards he worked as a visual artist in the broadest variety of fields, in a transdisciplinary manner. He would frequently interweave diverse techniques and materials.
Thomas Nölle developed personal styles throughout his career, always maintaining his freedom and independence from artistic trends. The foundation of his work is in the experiential observation of the world and of human nature, as well as the temporal connections of history, developing a broad thematic network with multi-referential meanings.
From his earliest work he focused his conceptual interest on socio-political, cultural and environmental questions, with an avant la lettre ecological spirit. The main thematic areas of his artistic practice from his earliest period until his final works were, on the one hand, an unequivocal social focus, with a critical vision of the impact on nature of industrialisation and the excesses of consumer society; power conflicts in interactions between cultures and social strata, especially in colonialism and neo-colonialism. On the other hand, he reflected deeply on the context of art, as well as on the interrelation between art, life, memory and history.
Experimentation with the greatest diversity of supports, techniques and materials was characteristic of his working praxis, distinguished as it was by an ongoing search for renewed paths and hybrid methods. In the area of photography, his experimentalism was also a constant factor, as he generally used technique in a processual and serialised manner, always in correlation with the subjects or motifs he was working on.
The Acervo Giannetti Nölle, established in 2025 and based in Madrid, is responsible for the conservation, cataloguing, digitisation and dissemination of Nölle’s work. The Acervo is working on the gradual publication of the volumes of the Catalogue Raisonné of Thomas Nölle’s complete artworks, organised chronologically.
First period: 1960s to 1980s
In 1978 Nölle celebrated an individual exhibition at the Kurhaus Dangast, which was known at the time as the gathering place of the Oldenburg Free Academy revolving around the figure of Joseph Beuys.
His numerous travels in European cities in the 1960s and 1970s, including Pompey, Paris and London, and in countries all over the world, including Greece, Russia, India, Egypt and in the Caribbean, left their mark from the start and were often the subject of his photographic work. In the period 1979 to 1981 he set off on a long journey through various countries in South America, including Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. Over this period he created photographic series and photo-performance work with a strongly social orientation, as seen in his exhibition, Notes on South America – A Journey | 1979–1981, at Casa de América, Madrid (6.02 – 28.03.2020): "The subjects made manifest in the photographs of this period from 1979 to 1981 reveal a gaze focused on the social sphere, but also on environmental problems and the relationships between human beings and nature."Casa de América, Thomas Nölle – Notes de América del Sur – Un viaje | 1979–1981, Madrid: Casa de América, 2020, documentation: https://www.casamerica.es/es/exposiciones/notas-de-america-del-sur These series were reproduced in his last artist book Notes from South America – A Journey | 1979–1981 (2020).Macarena Soto, "Thomas Nölle, un único disparo para retratar a América Latina", La Vanguardia, 06.02.2020: https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20200206/473313136727/thomas-nolle-un-unico-disparo-para-retratar-a-america-latina.html
Upon his return to Germany from his journey through South America, Nölle settled again in Bonn, carrying out intense artistic activity. Between 1983 and 1990 he devoted especially to large-format painting and photo-collage. During the 1980s he exhibited in various solo and group shows in Germany, with the following highlights: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Bonn, Yves Klein, Amongst Others (Solo, 1983); Kunstverein Bonn (1984), with the participation amongst other of Jean Tinguely, who was also involved in his action Das ist doch keine Art [That's no Art/no Way] together with Jürgen Pech; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf together with Joseph Beuys, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jürgen Klauke and Robert Rauschenberg, amongst others. In Düsseldorf he carried his public action Art is Health – Remember Yves Klein (1984), a phrase that was printed onto the tramways moving about the city. As was the case for Yves Klein, whose work was a point of reference for Nölle, art and life constituted for him an inseparable dynamic unity.
His individual exhibition in the Orangerie Schloss Augustusburg in Brühl, Room to Move (1988), brought together the majority of his large-format pictorial work on the period 1985–1988, and featured a site-specific installation of the same name on the subject of the frontiers of knowledge. His painting addresses subjects related to the fragility of memory, the fragmentation of history and human limitations. Dominated by earth tones, his paintings use overlayered material substrates upon which he inscribes figures and symbolic shapes. In 1991 he published a monographic catalogue of the pictorial work done in the period 1985–1991.
Themes: colonialism and neo-colonialism
Colonisation, neo-colonialism and the confrontations between cultures were amongst the subjects addressed by Nölle in various works, such as the series of photo-performance and electrographs entitled Um índio em Brasília [A Native in Brasília] (1980), or in the painting and mixed media series Mundus Novus (1990) on the colonisation of Latin America, exhibited in several solo shows e.g. at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Königswinter, and the Städtischen Galerie Suhl, Germany.
He returned to the subject of neo-colonialism in extensive series of photographs and video art produced from 2002 to 2008 which deal critically with racism, discrimination, forced acculturalisation and the loss of memory, especially in relation to indigenous and African peoples. These works were shown in 2008 in the solo exhibition Tiempos Dorados [Golden Times] at the MEIAC, Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art, in Badajoz, Spain, curated by Nilo Casares, with the publication of a monographic catalogue. In 2015 a selection of this series was exhibited in Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, as part of the exhibition Über: ich [About: Me], curated by Eugenia Gortchokova.Künstlerhaus Wien, Über: ich, group exhibition, Vienna, 2015. Thomas Nölle, Tierra Madre (2007), photography: https://www.k-haus.at/besuch/kalender/ausstellung/288/brennende-fragen.html
Themes: art, nature, ecology and society
"A slap in the face, with works that would go against every convention of art","Wohlstandsmüll und gute Einfälle", Soest: Soester Anzeige 16.02.1977. wrote a German critic in an article on a 1977 Nölle exhibition in Soest, which dealt with the human and environmental damage caused by the excesses of consumer society and industrialisation.
Giving continuity to his intensely ongoing work exploring the relationships between art, nature, ecology and society begun in the 1970s, after his journey through South America in 1979-1981, and especially with his experiences in Brazil, he focused his gaze on the connection between deforestation and the extermination of indigenous peoples. In an interview with Ángel Antonio Rodríguez, Nölle affirmed:
"It was there where I became fully aware of the great problem of the environmental destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous peoples. For me it became synonymous with the destruction of the entire planet. In fact, from the very beginning of my artistic work the ecological aspect has taken on a highly important role, always in relation to human development and never as an isolated phenomenon." (Thomas Nölle)Interview by Ángel Antonio Rodríguez (December 2019), published in the catalogue Thomas Nölle – En passant, Madrid: Puxagallery, 2020, p. 2–11.
His work in urban and marine archaeology was one of the most remarkable and emblematic aspects of his oeuvre from 1989 on. On Barcelona beaches and especially at Barceloneta, Nölle systematically gathered and collected organic materials, residues and rubbish of all kinds, polished over decades by the salt water and tidal movements. Starting in 1990 these found objects were then used in various formats in his production dedicated to the connection between art, ecology and memory, including art boxes, mosaics, assemblages, environments and public art actions.
One of the most representative works of his critique and reflection on the consequences of capitalist modes of production and unsustainable consumption on the environment, the marine ecosystem and on the life of all species, including humans, was the kinetic installation Musée Méditerranée (2000-2002). It was exhibited in at the MUVIM Museum of Valencia (Observatori III, Spain, 2002), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza (2004), at the Re:NEW Festival (Pittsburgh, USA, 2016) and in the CCCB-Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona (DrapArt'16).
In 2015 his photographic project Mare Rostrum, a commission from Marviva Waste Agency of Catalonia, the Port of Barcelona and Drap-Art'15, which focused on the work of the Barcelona Fisherman's Association in retrieving rubbish from the Mediterranean Sea, was presented at the CCCB-Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona and later at various spaces throughout Catalonia. An article written on the project in the newspaper El País observed that "the project Mare Rostrum sets out a temporary conceptual bridge across 40 years of experimentations by Thomas Nölle."Roberta Bosco, "Arte para limpiar el mar". El País, 21.12.2015. https://elpais.com/ccaa/2015/12/20/catalunya/1450634646_619481.html
Nölle's work in marine archaeology culminated in his intervention in public space entitled SEA≈STORE (December 2016), presented at the Plaça dels Àngels square in front of MACBA – Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, during the festival Drap-Art'16. It consisted of two actions: the Portable Micro-Museums where Nölle gave a small artwork made with residual material found on the beach to every visitor willing to make a commitment to the preservation of the marine ecosystem, leading to the creation of a virtual museum on social media; and the installation Ephemeral Museum, a dome built using bioconstruction with reeds to be used as a laboratory for creative activities, open to the public.