Tomma abts bio

FRAME DETAILS & ELEMENTS

Frame

All our frames are manufactured in the USA, using eco-friendly & sustainably sourced engineered hardwood for durability and a uniform finish that is free of defects. Frames are available in Black or White Satin and Honey Pecan.

Mat

All prints are hinged to a conservation quality, acid-free and lignin-free Alpha Cellulose matboard, using an acid-free linen tape. The mat's surface paper is fade and bleed resistant and is attached to a conservation quality foam-core mounting board that will keep the work safe from deterioration over time. Artworks with a deckled or decorative edges will be floated on the matboard, with acrylic spacers to separate the art from the glazing. All mounting is fully reversible, without any potential damage to the art.

Acrylic Glazing

All of our frames come with picture quality .090 mm plexiglass, which blocks 66% of UV to prevent color fading from exposure to light, keeping your art protected for years to come. It is now considered the industry standard for artists, museums and galleries throughout the world.

Dimensions

For images up to 30" x 40"

• 1 1/4” wide, 3/4” deep, with a 2 1/2” wide mat.
• We generally leave 1/4” - 1/2” of paper showing around the image, to accommodate signatures and for visual appeal.

For sheet sizes larger than 30” x 40”

• Please contact an Artspace advisor for a custom quote.

Tomma Abts was born in Kiel, Germany in 1967. She attended Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany between 1989 and 1995 and is currently living and working in London.

Abts paintings develop slowly over time. She begins with no preconceived ideas of how the finished article will look, allowing a more intuitive journey, with each picture slowly unfolding itself through the layering and overlaying of both oil and acrylic paint. Colour and shapes are built up instinctively and, as a result, lines of former shapes are still visible under the layers of paint; evidence of how it has evolved. Abts technique is to paint around the colour already laid, which often means that the initial first layer of colour is still visible once the painting is complete. Abts says of her paintings that they are objects but also images, an illusion yet real. The completed painting suddenly realises itself to the artist once the colour, layers of paint and geometric shapes come alive. She then names her works, carefully and deliberately, selecting from a dictionary of first names. To further add to the systematic approach of her painting each canvas is the standard format of 48 x 38 cm and always portrait in orientation.

Veeke (2005) is as jagged a painting as its spiky name suggests. From a base colour of murky green grey emerge what appear like flat knives or spears, layered on top of one another, and streaking across the canvas from right to left like a dirty neon chevron. They seem to cast softer dove-grey shadows as they pass, creating intricate, impossible perspectives. Muted and sombre in timbre, the complex layering of space folds over and over onto itself, creating a kind of self-sufficient vortex that can almost be likened to a pool.

Tomma Abts was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2004, and won the Turner Prize in 2006, after being selected for exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland and Greengrassi, in south-east London. Other recent solo exhibitions inc

London-based artist Tomma Abts (German, born 1967) has a remarkably singular and rigorous approach to contemporary painting. Since 1998, she has remained committed to producing acrylic and oil-on-canvas works, mainly in the same 19.8 x 15 inch (48 x 38 centimeter) portrait format. Abts’s works are powerfully magnetic—simultaneously muted and charged, offbeat and rich.

In addition to her chosen dimensions, Abts’s painting is shaped by other self-imposed parameters: she works with basic formal elements—arcs, circles, planes, polygons, and stripes—that she carefully layers, juxtaposes, and interweaves in ways both subtle and eccentric. She adds highlights and shadows, transforming two-dimensional canvases into complex illusory spaces. Rarely does she work with a preconceived notion of the final composition. Instead, Abts begins with loose washes of color and shapes that enable the work to unfold gradually. The artist’s additive technique, building up forms and colors on the same canvas—sometimes over a number of years—constitutes an evolutionary process that is embodied in the composition of the finished painting. In their final iterations, the forms and figures display a tension between their status as fixed images and their apparent potential for movement.

Abts’s canvases present themselves as events, in which color and form are only the most visible occurrences in a series of decisions, revisions, corrections, and adjustments that are suggested by the ridges and seams of underlying layers. “I try to define the forms precisely. They become, through shadows, texture, etcetera, quite physical and therefore ‘real’ and not an image of something else. The forms don’t symbolize or describe anything outside of the painting. They represent themselves.” Indeed, the paintings are self-reflexive, and this effect is furthered by the artist’s titling rubric: once a painting is complete, she names it after an entry in a dictionary of first names from a particular

German-born visual artist

Tomma Abts (born 26 December 1967) is a German-born visual artist known for her abstract oil paintings. Abts won the Turner Prize in 2006. She currently lives and works in London, England.

Early life and education

Abts was born in 1967 in Kiel, Germany, to a teacher in a primary school and a gynecologist. Between 1989 and 1995 Abts attended the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. She has been living in London since 1995, and maintains a studio in Clerkenwell, which she has occupied since first coming to London on a grant. It was only in 2002 that she was able to live solely from her paintings.

Work

Starting each of her works without a preconceived idea, knowing only the size of the canvas and her materials, Abts works in acrylic and oil, often building up her designs from repetitive geometrical elements. Her style can be classified as abstract, but also in opposition to Germany's Neo-Expressionist figurative painting. None of her paintings are representational. There are no references to nature, the world or any other theme. The abstraction in her paintings is supported by the lack of detail and an overall retro feel. The paintings involve complex shapes that are layered and woven in different ways with added highlights, shadows and sense of depth.

Abts used to work on canvasses of all sizes. Since the early 2000s, all of Abts' paintings are 48 x 38 centimeters and the titles of her paintings are derived from a dictionary of German first names. She has said that this is the size and style that works for her. Each work takes on a color scheme that is rich and somewhat neutral. The colors are not obviously vibrant and work with each other's tones within each work of art. Abts creates a 3D effect by continually and