ART-PRESENTATION: Tomma Abts
One of the most significant artists of her generation and the winner of the 2006 Turner Prize, Tomma Abts is known for her acrylic and oil paintings whose extraordinary magnetism belies their modest scale. Tomma Abts’ methodical process and use of the 48cm x 38cm format have remained more or less constant for the past twenty years. Yet within these self-imposed parameters she finds endless possibilities for experimentation.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
In Tomma Abts’ solo exhibition nat David Zwirner Gallery in New York are on show paintings from two distinct but related bodies of work that, in different ways, showcase Abts’s sustained engagement with process and form. Tomma Abts is known for her complex paintings and drawings, the subject of which is ultimately the process of their creation. Since 1998, she has remained committed to producing acrylic and oil-on-canvas works, mainly in the same 19.8 x 15 inch (48 x 38 cm) portrait format. Abts’s works are powerfully magnetic, simultaneously muted and charged, offbeat and rich. In addition to her chosen dimensions, Abts’s painting is shaped by other self-imposed parameters: she works with basic formal elements (arcs, circles, planes, polygons, and stripes) that she carefully layers, juxtaposes, and interweaves in ways both subtle and eccentric. She adds highlights and shadows, transforming two-dimensional canvases into complex illusory spaces. Rarely does she work with a preconceived notion of the final composition. Instead, Abts begins with loose washes of color and shapes that enable the work to unfold gradually. The artist’s additive technique, building up forms and colors on the same canvas—sometimes over a number of years—constitutes an evolutionary process that is embodied in the composition of the finished painting. In their final iterations, the forms and figures display a tension between their status as fixed images and their apparent potential for movement. Abts’s canvases present themselves as events, in which color and form are only the most visible occurrences in a series of decisions, revisions, corrections, and adjustments that are suggested by the ridges and seams of underlying layers. “I try to define the forms precisely. They become, through shadows, texture, etcetera, quite physical and therefore ‘real’ and not an image of something else. The forms don’t symbolize or describe anything outside of the painting. They represent themselves”. Indeed, the paintings are self-reflexive, and this effect is furthered by the artist’s titling rubric: once a painting is complete, she names it after an entry in a dictionary of first names from a particular region in Germany. The names selected for the titles are neutral and abstract and thereby resist direct references to gender. Also on view are works from a recent group of 34 x 25-inch (86,3 x 63,5 cm) paintings by the artist, begun in 2017, that differ in both approach and intent from her 48 x 38 cmformat canvases. Here, Abts starts with a predetermined composition, first making a drawing in a one-to-one scale that establishes the structure of the work, using only stripes to create involved spatial configurations, and then beginning the painting process on canvas as she adds in color. The resulting works, titled only with successive Roman numerals, offer a distinctive take on Abts’s singular and ongoing interrogation of the fundamental elements of painting.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 6/11-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
