Deadly Logos

Satirical new art dealing with multi national corporations that supported Hitler and the Nazis, using their logos in conjunction with images from the Third Reich All art works by Thomas Dellert 2015 Prints on Metal

Thomas Dellert
a brave Swedish artist

Already at age 10 he would make his first modern art paintings and collage, depicting war and atrocities . Being born only eight years after the end of WW2 Thomas was living in an after war atmosphere full of stories and war documentaries, he watched on one of the first TV sets in Sweden This would also become a great influence for his art form he today calls “ Documentarism “ Having heard the many stories from his grandmother who had lived through two world wars, and his grandfather who participated in the Berlin Olympics in 1936 he got interested in history and story telling. Thomas was also at an early age exposed to the first documentaries from the liberation of concentration camps and death camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. This would later become one of his main themes in his art and created a need to tell this story to future generations. He has worked on his “Shoah” art trying to tell the story of the holocaust for over 30 years. He was chosen to exhibit at the first Holocaust conference held at the Stockholm Culture house in 2000 and in 2008 he had Auschwitz Birkenau closed down for one day to be able to make his short movie “Silent white hell “ In 2015 he had a large multimedia exhibit titled “ Stunde Null “ to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the and of WW 2 and the battle of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide in his bunker. This resulted in a series of portraits titled “Face of Evil “ using Adolf Hitler as the raw model for all kinds of evil in the world. He also exhibited another new series of works titled “ Deadly Logos “ based on the logos of world corporations that profited on WW2 and the Holocaust and that today are involved in the new evil of world terrorism.
Thomas works are both satirical and informative in structure, and they carry with them both the awareness of the deep darkness in human nature as well as a shining light of hope for man kind.

If there is any “leitmotif” that soaks through Dellert’s works -it is “History”, but not only the presence, but the whole 20th century from the Nazi genocide and the Holocaust, to the slaughter in Vietnam, the fall of Soviet Empire’s, the Berlin Wall, the massacre at the Tiananmen Square, the war against Iraq. Those are not easy topics to portray but art after all shouldn’t be about easy subjects. Many artists in the history like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Goya, and Picasso that we know so well were all stimulated by the image of war . Dellert manages to form these historical events into a personal reality.
Dellert’s oeuvres are full of outspoken humanistic motives inspired by his international surrounding and events that have formed, and Is ,forming all our lives
Neither literature nor art would have any meaning or reason of existence without a human involvement. For if its the Buddha statues in Afghanistan being destroyed by Talibans, or Babylon’s ancient walls in Iraq ruined by American tanks, it is “History” - history linked to the private life of every one of us. This relation is something, which is clearly evident in the art of Thomas Dellert.
In Dellert’s vast production, which excels from hand printed silk-screens, photomontage, paintings to short films, and photography.