The Small Works of Tomma Abts
“Kobo” (1999)
Ken Johnson writes: “What a transformation! The New Museum’s show of paintings by Tomma Abts is as quiet, spare and luminous as ‘Unmonumental’ - the big show of assemblages and collages that inaugurated the museum’s new building in December - was congested and noisy. Widely spaced on three white walls under a soaring ceiling with multiple skylights, Ms. Abts’s 14 small works look as though they died and went to heaven.”
“Eppe” (2006)
“You might suspect that so much bright space would be too much for Ms. Abts’s seemingly modest canvases. Her abstract, hard-edged compositions, each one measuring just 18 7/8 by 15 inches, are the opposite of showy. They have a nerdy, introverted spirit that would seem to prefer more intimate conditions.”
“Feihe” (2004)
“Each seems a little world unto itself. The alternation between the expansive space of the gallery and the absorbing compression of individual paintings is exhilarating.”
“Keke” (2006)
“Ms. Abts works with basic formal elements: stripes, arcs, circles, planes and polygons, which she carefully layers, juxtaposes and interweaves in all sorts of subtly eccentric ways. Her colors are muted and offbeat but seductively rich, and in defiance of classic Modernist abstraction she adds highlights and shadows, creating shallow, illusory spaces. Often the paintings resemble pictures of imaginary, possibly scientific three-dimensional models.”
“Fewe” (2005)
“You can see that she does much painting and repainting. Though flat, the paintings are not smooth: they are crisscrossed by ridges and seams of underlying layers. It is an art of decisions, revisions, corrections and adjustments, and the cumulative textures, like scar tissue, give the impression that the final pictures are hard won.”
“Jelth” (2003)
“Stylistically, the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or ’60s. They look retro-futuristic, like abstract designs for mid-20th-century paperback covers. They are not ironic, but there is an understated playfulness about them, as though painting were a kind of rigorously intellectual game whose rules only Ms. Abts knows.”
“Tabel” (1999)
“Earlier works consisting of relatively simple, curvy and organic forms - like ‘Tabel’ and ‘Kobo,’ both from 1999 - call to mind the biomorphic abstractions of Hans Arp. Later works favor more intricate geometries.”
“In “Meko” (2006), a composition of radiating red stripes interrupted by a rough loop of diamond-shaped forms looks as if it were cut out of red paper and is floating just above an off-white surface, onto which it casts green shadows. It’s not Op Art exactly, but it is optically riveting.”
“Welf” (2001)
“While Ms. Abts’s imagery seems to exist in a timeless, immaterial dimension, as though on a computer screen, it is grounded in the physical, tangible facts of paint. The layered, textured paint shows that she doesn’t just translate an image that she sees complete in her mind’s eye. Rather she arrives at her compositions circuitously, through trial and error. The transcendental image emerges from a human, terrestrial process of searching and discovering. The cerebral is balanced by the sensual.”
Via N.Y. Times
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