Liliane Tomasko b. 1967

Overview

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour.

Liliane Tomasko is known for her quietly powerful, richly evocative works. With a focus on the domestic sphere, the artist—who originally trained as a sculptor at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Arts—has a unique working method: she creates soft sculptures from fabrics stacked in dimly-lit interior spaces. Tomasko then photographs the resulting agglomerations with a flash-less Polaroid camera, producing images that are intentionally distorted. These semi-abstract photographic formsphantoms of sortsinspire the undulating masses of light and color that the artist paints so skillfully in oil on linen.

 

The resulting works are visually lush, and leave no doubt about Tomasko’s abiding interest in the work of the Post-Impressionist painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuilllard. Her work equally evokes of the quietude of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, as well as the carefully contrived, almost architectonic, severity of Baroque masters Georges de La Tour and Johannes Vermeer (a severity that Tomasko intentionally fractures).

 

Drawn to subjects that speak to the human condition, the artist arouses in the viewer a sense of discomfort that comes from being gently nudged toward the thin line that separates love from loss, liberation from constriction, presence from absence, and ultimately, life from death. Tomasko’s forms, like her palette, a tense balance between stasis and chaos, with suggestive realities that seem, magically, to ebb and flow across her canvas.

 
Biography

Born in Switzerland, Liliane Tomasko's work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Locks Gallery and the IVAM, Institut Valencia d'Art Modern. 

 

Recent solo exhibitions include: dark goes lightly,  Château la Coste, France (2019); Caja de sueños, Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; 12 nights x dreams, ROCA Rockland Center for the Arts, New York, USA (both 2018); Kunstwerk, two-person exhibition with Sean Scully, Sammlung Klein, Germany (2017); Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami, USA; Invisible World, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA and dusk at dawn, Kunstalle Rostock, Germany (all 2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Contemporary Chaos, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2019); Abstract Painting Now!, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, (2017) and Sleepless: The Bed in History and Contemporary Art, 21er Haus, Vienna, Austria (2015). Tomasko’s work is represented in the public collections of The Albertina, Vienna; Hilti Art Foundation, Liechtenstein; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Lowe Art Museum, Miami; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

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