Tomma Abts

Dako 2016 is a flat work cast in aluminium in which the artist has chosen to explore in metal the strong relief of a work originally begun as a painting on canvas. The composition emanates from a central ring, which also functions as a vanishing point. Raised straight lines forming blade-like shapes shoot out from the ring in a starburst, zigzagging across the surface towards the edges of the metal sheet. Abts has explained that while she was working on the original painting she became unhappy with the evolution of forms and more interested in the jagged lines which were emerging. This prompted her to abandon the painting and cast the canvas in aluminum, a process which destroyed the painting. As is the case with all of Abts paintings, the title Dako comes from a dictionary of place names.

Abts’s paintings explore a concentrated language of material, form, space and volume. Since 1998 she has painted consistently on modestly sized canvases measuring forty-eight by thirty-eight centimetres. She uses no source material and has no preconceived idea of how each composition will look. For her, the act of painting is ‘a concrete experience anchored in the material I am handling’ (quoted in Bedford 2012, pp.101). Neither abstract nor figurative, her paintings oscillate between an attention to how they are made and the resulting image. Each painting is achieved through a cumulative sequence of intuitive yet complex decisions guided by the internal logic of its composition; while the finished picture does not necessarily display different layers of mark-making, the final outcome gives a sense of the painting as a wrought object.

With all of Abts’s paintings, a tension is thus maintained between the work’s physical qualities and the form that it describes, between surface material and pictorial illusion. Other works by her in Tate’s collection such as Zebe 2010 (Tate T13592) reflect her interest in how a painting inhabits reality as an object or ‘thing’ and, at the same time, a parallel world with its own set of rules, led her to investigate the casting process. In 2006 she made Aeid, her first work which was the direct result of casting in aluminium the surface of a painting that she felt was unresolved. Abts has explained:

each time I try to finish a painting it feels like I have to find a new solution that is specific to that work. While working on Jesz 2013 it became clear at a certain point that I couldn’t resolve it by carrying on painting it, so I had to think of a different solution. I had the idea to cast it in bronze, because I wanted a green patina you can get with it. I was curious how the somewhat impermanent and random patina would interact with the impasto surface of the original work. The result was unpredictable and I really liked it. I have made a cast before, an aluminum one in 2006 called Aeid. In that case I was interested in bringing out the strong relief of the original painting in the much colder and harder material of the metal. The cast replaces the painting.

(Tomma Abts in conversation with Clarrie Wallis, Senior Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate, 8 January 2018.)

These cast works therefore reflect the artist’s ambition to explore questions surrounding the objecthood of painting. She has said that her finished paintings are like objects and that her casts ‘feel like paintings’. As such they can be understood as extending the activity of painting while, at the same time, exploring how they ‘operate as things in the world’ (Tomma Abts in conversation with Clarrie Wallis, Senior Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate, 8 January 2018).

Further reading
Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Turner Prize 2006, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain 2006.
Lisa Phillips, Bruce Hainley, Laura Hoptman, Tomma Abts, exhibition catalogue, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 2008.
Christopher Bedford, ‘Dear Painter ... Tomma Abts in conversation with Christopher Bedford’, Frieze, no.145, March 2012, pp.100–1.

Clarrie Wallis
January 2018