Tomma Abts

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Tomma Abts at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. Included in the exhibition will be paintings from two distinct but related bodies of work that, in different ways, showcase Abts’s sustained engagement with process and form. This will be the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2014.

Abts is known for her complex paintings and drawings, the subject of which is ultimately the process of their creation.

Working in accordance with a self-determined and evolving set of  parameters, the artist enacts a series of decisions, which results in compositions that are intuitively constructed according to an internal logic. While abstract, her paintings are nevertheless illusionistic, rendered with sharp attention to details—such as shadows, three-dimensional effects, and highlights—that defy any single, realistic light source. As she has noted, “Making a painting is a long-winded process of finding a form for something intuited … and making whatever shape and form it takes as clear and precise as possible.”1

Read more

Image: Tomma Abts, Samke, 2019 (detail)