COLOGNE, GERMANY.- Museum Ludwig presents Tomas Schmit: Are Humans Capable of Thought?, on view through June 24, 2007. The Fluxus pioneer and draughtsman Tomas Schmit died on 4 October 2006 in Berlin. Throughout his life he wrote his own commentaries to his works in his catalogues. The fourth and last volume of these artist’s books cum catalogue raisonée will appear posthumously in April 2007. To mark this occasion, Museum Ludwig Schmit has arranged an exhibition featuring some 150 drawings, books and editions covering 40 years of creative production.

The basis of Tomas Schmit’s work consisted in artistic reflection on scientific questions. The underlying topics of his texts and drawings present themselves in, for instance, questions about evolution, or brain and behavioural research, ort about perception. Schmit tackled questions that that few scientists would dare to ask, such as: “How does a chameleon, know which colour it should assume? How does a flounder, whose eyes peer upwards, know when the seabed has the same colour as its scales?” Schmit shows that a lot of what occurs in the world of animals, humans and plants is far more difficult and bizarre than appearances might suggest. His art has constantly sought to plumb the mechanisms of perception.

Tomas Schmit was born in 1943 in Wipperfürth close to Cologne. As a young man he travelled to Wiesbaden and George Maciunas and became part of the Fluxus movement. He became renowned for his seductively simple actions, such as his “Zyklus for water-pails (or beer bottles or wine bottles etc)” from 1962. Schmit participated in almost all of the international Fluxus festivals, including the legendary action “24 Stunden” (1965 in Wuppertal), and was involved in the organisation of the Fluxus event “20. Juli”, which was staged in 1964 at the TU in Aachen. In the early seventies he turned to writing and drawing, and to producing editions, series, books, and even a film entitled “e-constellations“ (2004). In 2005 he published two audio CDs on which he reads his own texts.

Parallel to the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, the Cologne-based Galerie Michael Werner will be showing the exhibition “nicht immer alles dazusagen!”, which features two series of drawings by Tomas Schmit dating from 1999 and 2002 (18.04. – 16.06).

Each exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue. Schmit’s self-penned Katalog 4 is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.