Artist - Liliane Tomasko - LT_B-37

Liliane Tomasko

For many years now, the work of Liliane Tomasko has been affected by an intensive investigation of dreams, the unconscious and the emotions. At the end of the 1990s, the artist created figurative, often melancholic paintings which explored dark spaces or curtained windows, often with a blurriness and an almost baroque handling of light, as if they were the subtle interiors of the inner. She also consistently explored the abandoned morning bed, with its furrows and imprints of nocturnal life. Whereas those works approached their subject by means of her immediate surroundings, as well as the metaphors of the bed and of absence, in recent years the painting of Tomasko has become abstract.

Even today, the wrinkles in an unmade bed are Tomasko’s point of departure and a catalyst for her abstract painting. At the beginning of her process, there is always a photograph of a bed which, with its tangled and crumpled sheets, determines the physical skeleton of a future picture. This allows Tomasko to give wide-ranging space to a free painterly process with acrylic paint and spray paint, out of which evolve paintings with dense and dynamically interwoven lines and looping forms. The insistent movements are reminiscent of endless, abstract morphologies and a rapidly growing, proliferating nature. The brushstrokes and sprayed lines extend past the edge of the canvas, so that the visible picture seems to be a window offering a view into the structure of the interior, like a portrait of the brain which, with a vigorous impetus, generates dreams and creates images. Other works, in their juxtaposition of clarity and indeterminacy, seem like topographies of dreams and materialized emotions. Here, she gives rise to more subtle painterly surfaces, overpaints existing structures, smears and lets the paint run.

Tomasko’s works derive their vitality from the tension between the figurative initiation and the painterly result of the various phases of her inner investigation of the nocturnal life that remains so hidden from us. We experience this vitality through the many layers and textures of her creative process. Just as the brain processes emotions and dreams, so Tomasko brings to light internal structures and matrixes and ushers them into a vigorous and vital mode of painting: into the present and out into the external.

Liliane Tomasko lives and works in Tappan, New York, and in Königsdorf, Germany. She studied at the Camberwell School of Art, at Chelsea College of Art and Design and finally at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her work has been exhibited throughout the world at institutions and museums: at the Château La Coste, France (2019–20); Museo MATE, Lima (2018–19); Rockland Center for the Arts, New York (2018); Kunstwerk: Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen (2017); Fundación Bancaja, Valencia (2016); Lowe Art Museum, Miami (2015); Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix (2015); Kunsthalle Rostock (2015); IVAM, Valencia, with a subsequent stop at the Casall Solleric in Palma de Mallorca (2011). In 2017, the Kunsthalle Krems featured her in the fundamental survey 'Abstract Painting Now' together with Gerhard Richter, Katharina Grosse, Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool and others. She will have a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen in Magdeburg in 2021.

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