Category: Tomma Abts

Winner of the 2006 Turner Prize, painter Tomma Abts makes small-scale, hard-edged abstractions that are the result of a rigorous working method. Using no source material, Abts builds the surfaces slowly, defining line and shape on overlapping layers. While the images often seem on the verge of representation, through Abts’s use of flattened perspective and color combinations, they always veer toward abstraction. Each painting is measured to exactly the same dimensions, and her titles, such as Isko (2008) and Teite (2008), are drawn from a German dictionary of first names, emphasizing each painting’s individuality and imparting a deeper sense of history and narrative to the canvases.