Thomas Lamprecht

Thomas Lamprecht is an artist whose work focuses on confluence of language, visual images and music. Lamprecht’s involvements spanned through the art world, business and academic arenas where he led creative groups at international branding and marketing firms, taught art and advertising, curated shows and produced fine art, music and writing.

Thomas, [“Tomek”—nickname of the Polish Tomasz] Stefan Stanisław Lamprecht was born in Warsaw, Poland—the only child of two architects. He attended school in UK and lived intermittently in Warsaw, London and Famagusta, Cyprus. He became American Citizen in 1975. Lamprecht began to study painting in 1969 at the Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts under the wing of the renowned Polish painter Aleksander Kobzdej. In 1973 he came to New York and entered the School of Visual Arts where he studied with Joseph Kosuth, Donald Nice, Larry Zox and other prominent New York artists. After graduating with B.F.A. degree he continued to Columbia University, Graduate School of the Arts, where he received his M.F.A. degree in painting and PHD candidacy in philosophy in 1978. While there, he started producing work in non-traditional media that sparked controversy among some conservative graduate faculty. Saved from disciplinary expulsion by the school’s chairman and supporter late Stefan Sharff, Lamprecht was awarded an unprecedented opportunity to choose his own graduate advisors from among the pool of New York art world. He chose the artists whose work he was interested in at the time; Richard Artschwager, Ronald Bladen and Les Levine and the school hired them for the assignment.

Primarily a painter, Lamprecht has produced and presented work in many different media that include two-dimensional art, art performance, sculpture, music composition and recordings, installations, film/video and computer art. His work has been shown in a variety of major venues throughout U.S. and Europe. Lamprecht also wrote art criticism and lectured on art theory. After being based in New York for three decades, in August 2000 Lamprecht moved to San Francisco to start and develop the West Coast operations for Grey eMarketing, a division of Grey Global Group (WPP). Serving international needs of Fortune 300 clients, Lamprecht headed integrated creative teams on both coasts driving strategic creative and tactical concept development on branding, advertising and marketing. He directed global campaigns for such clients as; Adobe, Oracle, HP/Compaq, Sun Microsystems Gateway Computers, McAfee and others. His work produced many industry’s top awards.

In 2006, Lamprecht assumed creative leadership at the Hacker Group, the West Coast division of DraftFCB (IPG). In subsequent 4+ years, he helped transform the company from an unknown and creatively undistinguished production driven shop into the biggest integrated agency in Puget Sound region and the biggest west coast division of DraftFCB.

In August 2009, Lamprecht, along with his partner Kristina Müller-Eberhard, started the creative firm Plume21, LLC. Based in Seattle, the firm specializes in branding, advertising, marketing and multidisciplinary creative consultancy. It also has a gallery focused on showcasing the highest quality of creative vision by international artists in all media.

Lamprecht’s art has been shown in many major art venues that include: Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland; Carnegie Hall, NY, Kitchen, NY; OK Harris Gallery, New York; 112 Green Street Gallery, New York and others.

Aside from showing his art in exhibition and alternate art spaces, Lamprecht has performed his music throughout numerous New York clubs and venues from CBGB’s through Cotton Club to Carnegie Hall, Franklin Furnace, as well as prominent venues in Europe that included Basel Art Fair, Mazzo, Amsterdam, New Morning, Geneva among others. In 1978 while collaborating with a group of friends from his MFA program at Columbia on an art performance project, he released his first record, Model Citizens, produced by John Cale. Subsequent to Model Citizens Lamprecht created media performance projects including the collaboration with Gloria Richards, 2 Yousand Before Religion with the violin virtuoso Michael Galasso and dancer/choreographer Frank Conversano. During the early/middle 80’s, Lamprecht released solo recordings of his music including the albums “TOMEK” and “Love & Hate”. Through the 90’s he continued to compose and record ‘Musical Poems’ that were produced only for narrowcast distribution.

Lamprecht has served on the faculty at the Parsons School of Design, NY, Baruch College of the City University of New York, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, Academy of Art University, San Francisco, Breda School of Art and Design, Holland and others.

In 1994, Lamprecht created an annual retrospective exhibition, the Contemporary Annual, that was hosted and largely funded by the National Arts Club in New York. The current relevancy of the show, that rivaled the Whitney Biannual in scope while including international artists, was enhanced through it being curated not by professional curators but by a different appointed artist each year. The Contemporary Annual has been established as a nonprofit, 501(c) organization.

Active in the design and advertising industries, Lamprecht held executive posts as a creative and marketing lead at several major Madison Avenue agencies and ran his own Manhattan based design firm specializing in hi-end, photography books. Some of the notable titles include; Visions: Fifty Years of the United Nations (Hearst), The Art of Collecting: Victor and Sally Gantz (Christie’s, NY) and The Encyclopedia of Photography (Simon & Schuster). Lamprecht’s firm also produced and distributed several independent artists’ books. The agencies where Thomas held key creative positions included Bates Worldwide, NY; Siegel & Gale, NY; Wunderman Cato Johnson, NY and others. The accounts included; Time Inc., Citibank, AT&T, Dom Perignon, Sauza Tequila, Philip Morris, Abrams, Hearst Publications, Penguin Books, City of New York and New York Post among many others. He arrived in San Francisco in 2000 to open a division of Grey Global Group (WPP). In 3 years the division became the fastest growing within GGG. The clients included such companies as Oracle, Adobe, Sun, HP and others. In 2006 Lamprecht moved to Seattle to help grow creative capabilities of DraftFCB division, Hacker Group. By 2010 the agency was named the biggest in the Puget Sound region. As of 2010 Lamprecht is co-heading his creative firm Plume21.

Lamprecht married Alexandra Godfrey in 1982 (later divorced) and fathered two children; son Emil Tomasz Lamprecht and Daughter Zofia Maria Lamprecht. In 2003 he married his present wife and creative partner Kristina Müller-Eberhard.