Thomas Kiesewetter, throughout more than twenty years of career, has been known for his three-dimensional metallic sculptures, whose shapes emerge out of folded or bent metal sheets and surfaces, constantly playing between positive and negative volumes. His sculptures joyfully move between figurative playfulness and abstraction, taking great inspiration from the astuteness of drawing, the meticulous folding of origami, and the initial echoes of early Cubism. There is something friendly about the shapes he makes, since Kiesewetter aims for a kind of modernity that, when stripped of all cynicism and desperation, allows us to form a simple connection with his shapes, as if they were friendly enigmas and riddles: they appeal to the human sense of surprise and the capacity for wonder.
Kiesewetter's creative process triggers thoughts of constructivism. Starting from drawn sketches, he creates a small cardboard model to ultimately evaluate the idea in its three-dimensional functionality. Once the model is approved, he reproduces them in various scales with metallic materials. The solutions he finds to join together his sculpture parts are always ingenious and require a manual touch; for example, he never just welds two pieces together. Also, these operations of attachment take place after the metal sheets have been painted to ensure that the marks of his labor are well visible on his sculptures' surfaces.
His works belong to many prestigious art collections in Europe, such as the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and the Goetz Collection, in Germany, and the Saatchi Collection, in the UK, as well as in the US, where he appears in the New York MoMA and in the Los Angeles MOCA's Collections.
Thomas Kiesewetter (Kassel, Germany, 1963) completed his studies in 1994 obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in Fine Art at HdK (Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany). Nowadays, he keeps on living and working in the German capital.