Accumulations
Tomma Abts at Serpentine Galleries, London
Tomma Abts is a painter, and has one of the most accomplished careers in Europe. After all, this German artist won the Turner Prize in 2006. However, she has yet to have a major survey in the United Kingdom. The Serpentine Galleries has solved that issue though by staging an exhibition that brings together ten years of work from the prolific Abts. While all of this may sound quite grand on paper, viewers will encounter works that are surprisingly understated and skillful in their intimate scale and elegant in their execution.
Abts has made a career built on parameters and regulations. She has worked almost exclusively in the size of 48 cm x 38 cm (approximately 19 x 15 inches). Her paintings only take use of oil or acrylic paint. Canvas or cast aluminum are her two choices of support and surface. This may lead one to think that Abts would be limited in her output and her visual language, but the opposite has occurred. By removing the obstacles of technical questions like material, scale, or medium, Abts has been able to explore color, composition, surface, and light in a multitude of ways.
Abts has no pre-determined image in mind, but instead slowly works in various layers of paint until the final form takes shape. This leads to sculptural surfaces, where lines and forms of previous compositions lead to textured surfaces or accents in the final painting. Color palettes also benefit from this slow approach, which allows for nuanced and distinctive combinations. Although Abts works in elegant geometric abstractions, her process-oriented deliberations lead to subtleties not found in most hard-edged abstract works. These are paintings that benefit from a viewer taking time and examining the surface for more than just a few moments.
In recent years, Abts has been altering her rubric slightly. Her latest works now advances her sculptural plays with paint, by bisecting and splicing her usual 48 cm x 38 cm canvases and panels. Rather than an act of reduction, the negative space adds to the overall work by actively participating towards shaping the overall composition. Other examples of evolution would be the artist’s casts. Much like reliefs, Abts casts he compositions in aluminum that mimics the same size as her canvases. If Abts sees a need to add paint, she might add layers of oil or acrylic leaving only the texture of the cast visible.
Many artists tend to fluctuate wildly between mediums, materials, and concepts. However, Tomma Abts moves slowly and deliberately. As her show at the Serpentine Galleries show, ten years has allowed her to slowly and carefully explore every option in her chosen methods of painting. Rather than race from one idea to the next, Abts has developed a practice devoted to the endless results found within a set of limitations.
