Thomas Emde

Thomas Emde

Thomas Emde (born March 22, 1959 in Korbach ) is a German artist , lighting designer , inventor and entrepreneur .

Life

After school he completed an apprenticeship as a gravure color retoucher at the publishing house of the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau . In 1983 he began studying fine art at the Kassel Art Academy , which he continued in 1985 at the Berlin University of the Arts . In 1990 he completed his studies as a master class student. A studio grant from the Jürgen Ponto Foundation and the City of Frankfurt am Main brought him to Frankfurt, where he has lived and worked ever since, before he finished his studies. His daughter Mala Emde (* 1996) is an actress.

From the very beginning, Thomas Emde was interested in color as a material. Emde mainly created colored objects and colored fleeces . Towards the end of the 1990s he began to deal more intensively with light - understood as immaterialized color. In 1999 the first light art works and architectural light installations were created.

Since 1999 Emde has founded several companies for the planning and implementation of major artistic projects in the field of light and was involved in the other company in the same segment as well as in the field of research, development, manufacture and sales of lighting systems. Other entrepreneurial activities are aimed at registering, acquiring and managing intellectual property.

plant

art

Already in Thomas Emde's early work, the focus on the material color and its perception was in the foreground. Thomas Emde already began to physically change color material in the work groups on color objects and color space bodies, so that new properties such as B. higher toughness and density gained. In this way he was able to use color as an autonomously designed material that creates its own structures. In the case of the color objects, a three-dimensional body - such as a profiled wooden or metal part - forms the basis of the work. Knob-like color fields occupy the cavities of these bodies or cover them with a fur made of colored matter.

Starting in 1992, Thomas Emde developed a production process with the group of colored and motif fleeces that made it possible to create a picture from pure color material and to dispense with traditional image carriers such as canvas. On a base made of color material, wafer-thin layers of color are layered on top of each other, so that a three-dimensional grid structure is created from tiny color knobs. The knobs are built up layer by layer from different colors. The result is a work that changes color depending on the direction in which the observer is looking. The color fleece heralds the dynamic play of colors that will play a major role in Thomas Emde's later light art works.

The motif fleece is a further development of the color fleece. Emde uses snapshots of nature in motion, such as clouds, waves, waterfalls, as a template. Dot-grid templates of the motifs are first implemented in glass matrices that precisely define the position and thickness of the colored knobs. As in the classic gravure printing process , color is then distributed on and in the matrix. After drying, this color matrix, which consists purely of color material, is removed from the glass matrix and forms the color base for the subsequent growth process of the three-dimensional nub structure. The individual knobs are built up from up to three hundred layers of color, so that the result is a picture motif with iridescent colors.

Using this process, Thomas Emde created a monumental cloud fleece in the format of 1680 × 1235 cm for the Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt am Main ( Commerzbank Tower ) from the end of 1996 to the beginning of 1998 .

Architectural light installations

In the site-specific works by Thomas Emde, light was added as an additional element as early as the early 1990s. So he mounted translucent colored fleece in front of windows, creating colored light spaces. The next step - the sole use of light as the intangible carrier of color - was obvious. In 1999 he realized his first monumental light installation with the artistic lighting of the Commerzbank skyscraper built by Norman Foster .

Other projects that companies in which Emde was involved realized in the following years in cooperation with architects, builders and planners include a. the lighting of St. Bartholomew's Cathedral in Frankfurt am Main, the seat of government of the Emir of Qatar and a large part of the old town of Doha opposite the palace.

The artistic principle of all architectural light projects is not just to illuminate the building, but to create a real light image that makes the structure and the meaning of a building visible at night.

Patents and products

In order to be able to implement the lighting effect aimed at in the projects, Emde developed new products and technical processes that he had patented. His patent applications and product developments include the emdelight glass - a light glass whose color and brightness can be continuously controlled. LEDs serve as the light source and are fed into a pane of glass from one or two opposite edges. The glass is printed with a dot grid through which the light is decoupled from the pane in a controlled manner. Light or shining glass becomes a flexible material and an integral part of architecture and design.

Another Emde patent family relates to organic LEDs (OLEDs) as a light source. Under his direction, the first demonstrator of an OLED light source was developed at the Braunschweig Institute for High Frequency Technology in 2012.

The connection between glass and OLEDs or LEDs as a light source can also be used to develop large-area, transparent displays that can be used indoors and outdoors. The principle of the transparent screen, also secured with patents, which can be used as a facade element, partition wall, furniture panel, is a further development of the Emdelight glass that Thomas Emde is working on with cooperation partners.

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1993: Sprengel Museum , Hanover
• 1994: Sculpture Museum Glaskasten Marl
• 1995: Museum am Ostwall , Dortmund / Germany
• 1997: Centro Wilfredo Lam, Havana / Cuba
• 1998: International Space Gallery, Los Angeles
• 1999: Museu de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City
• 2000: Center d'art contemporain, Brussels
• 2001: Galerie Susanne Albrecht, Munich

Architectural light installations (selection)

• 1999: Commerzbank Tower, Frankfurt am Main / Germany
• 2000: Nassauische Sparkasse, Wiesbaden / Germany
• 2001: Bauhaus Masters' Houses, Dessau / Germany
• 2002: Administration building Kali & Salz AG, Kassel / Germany
• 2005: Römer, Frankfurt am Main / Germany
• 2006: Union Investment Bank, Frankfurt am Main / Germany; Tornado Tower, Doha / Qatar
• 2009: Tornado Tower / Qipco Tower, Doha / Qatar; Imperial Cathedral of St.Bartholomäus, Frankfurt am Main / Germany
• 2011: Barwa Commercial Avenue, Doha / Qatar
• 2012: Bo El Qabib Mosque, Doha / Qatar

Group exhibitions (selection)

• 2001: Herzliya Museum of Modern Art, Tel Aviv / Israel
• 2000: Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland / USA
• 1997: Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro / Brazil; Casa das Rosas, Sao Paulo / Brazil
• 1996: Newspace Gallery, Los Angeles / USA
• 1995: Kunst-Museum Ahlen / Germany
• 1994: Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel / Germany
• 1991: Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna / Austria

literature

• Building Department of the City of Frankfurt am Main (ed.): Der Frankfurter Domturm , Bonn, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86795-017-6
• Commerzbank AG (Ed.): Thomas Emde's fleece in the Commerzbank high-rise , Frankfurt am Main 1998
• Karin Stempel (Ed.): No limite da forma - Beyond the limit of form , exhibition catalog Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro a. a., 1997, ISBN 3-9802266-9-7
• Kasseler Kunstverein Fridericianum (Ed.): Ad libitum , exhibition catalog Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel 1994, ISBN 3-927941-06-9
• Kunsthalle Mannheim (Ed.): Thomas Emde , exhibition catalog Kunsthalle Mannheim 1992, ISBN 3-89165-079-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Thomas Emde in the catalog of the German National Library