Thomas Baumgärtel – The Banana Sprayer More than Banana

This catalogue raisonné presents the comprehensive, impressive and exciting oeuvre of an artist who,like no other, is a constant, as well as a driving force, behind the new art of the twenty-first century: urban art.
Thomas Baumgärtel’s  Banana of Excellence, which now distinguishes more than 4,000 art institutions around the globe, has made him world-famous. 

Long before review portals were invented, he awarded art venues withhis banana, uniting them to form a new global network. This book focuses on the years 2008 to 2018, in which theBanana Sprayer worked on no less than twenty work groups. The preceding overview of Thomas Baumgärtel’s exhibition venue shints at the global as pirations of the Banana Sprayer. The locations extend from Europe to Australia. Urban art creatively embodies the spirit of our time. The wellspring of this art is the public space, the street and the everyday life of people. Urban art does not take place in the shelter of the museum with its creative timeout, although it has long been on its way to becoming worthy of being exhibitedin museums and to shaping history. 

Within this twenty-first-century art system, the Banana Sprayer Thomas Baumgärtel is both a benchmark and a spur. The banana has become the signet of his life. It lends many a dangerous situation, but also many an idyll, a Dadaist and absurd perspective.
The motifs of Baumgärtel’s art are the major issues that affect the world. 

He takes them to the limit of what is imaginable – and occasionally even beyond this.
From Cologne, Thomas Baumgärtelset out to conquer the world. The focus is on the majorconflicts of our time, which, thanks to Thomas Baumgärtel’sbananas, become transformed into intensified, absurd, and at all times highly explosive images. Over the past ten years, Thomas Baumgärtel has created furtherdimensions of his impressive work. These reveal the idiosyncrasy of his ‘banana-like approach’ to the world.

Many thanks to the authors, whose clever texts illuminate Thomas Baumgärtel’s art from very different perspectives and understand it as a socio-artistic concept. In dialogue withThomas Baumgärtel, Wienand Verlag has transformed his work intoan exciting book. 

My special thanks go to project manager Jana Ronzhes, designer Nicole Meyer, editor Julia Frohnhoff andtranslator Gérard A. Goodrow.
Our greatest thanks go to the artist himself for persistently pushing the limits of and actively working on the core concerns of our world, lending visual form to the controversial issues of our present, thus making us conscious of them. 

Thomas Baumgärtel has made an outstanding contribution to the topic of‘art as knowledge of our world’.

Meinrad Maria Grewenig