Art

Tomma Abts

The Kiel-born visual artist and Turner Prize winner shows off her latest abstract yet ingenious oil paintings in this head-turning solo exhibition.

Image for Tomma Abts

Tomma Abts is above all a painter’s painter. Her works are the abstraction of abstraction and carry such subtle intentionality that it literally boggles the mind. In her current solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, 10 works continue her focus on a small range of painterly concerns – at once subverted through closer and closer inspection. “Jelto” is a slightly skewed rectangular canvas actually caste in bronze as a singular unique piece. Four same-sized canvases (“Meen”, “Telko”, “Weie” and “Unno”) play with illusionist space using only acrylic and oil, while “Jelte” alludes to the same play but is dissected and then partially cast in aluminum. In the largest and most mesmerising piece “I.”, stripe patterns fold back and forth while the actual canvas is cut off at the corner. However, describing this work really gives it no justice – you’ve simply got to see it to understand.

Through Jan 13