| The paintings of Tomma Abts depend upon a tense equipoise of material, and visual and temporal contradictions. The eponymous exhibition currently at the New Museum appropriately complements the concentration of its individual pieces. The show includes 15 dense, geometric abstractions, each in oil and acrylic on canvas, all of which are small (18 7/8 by 15 inches); it occupies the museum’s fourth floor, which contains approximately 3000 square feet of floor space and is flooded with southern light from a skylight at the top of a 24-foot ceiling. The gallery lends the work an almost celestial character, as if the paintings were gravitational accumulations of matter and thought orbiting around the mind of a viewer. | 
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Taylor Jones
Tomma Abst’s work was on view at the New Museum, NY through June 29.
Tomma Abts, Mehm, 2005. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 18.9 x 14.96 inches.
The paintings of Tomma Abts depend upon a tense equipoise of material,
visual, and temporal contradictions. The eponymous exhibition
currently at the New Museum appropriately complements the
concentration of its individual pieces. The show includes 15 dense,
geometric abstractions, each in oil and acrylic on canvas, all of
which are small (18 7/8 by 15 inches); it occupies the museum’s fourth
floor, which contains approximately 3000 square feet of floor space
and is flooded with southern light from a skylight at the top of a
24-foot ceiling. The gallery lends the work an almost celestial
character, as if the paintings were gravitational accumulations of
matter and thought orbiting around the mind of a viewer. Just as the
final success of each piece is in direct proportion to the success
Abts achieves in balancing its contradictory elements, the first
apparent success of the exhibition is the balance achieved between the
small scale of the work and the vastness of the exhibition space.Like many descriptions of her work, the museum’s press release calls
it "modest in size." However, the paintings do not succeed despite
their size; rather, they depend upon it. While not in the heroic scale
of the work of Barnett Newman or Richard Serra, they bear the
intensity of an equivalent yet alternate magnitude. They require a
physical proximity and focus more akin to a conversation than a stage
and podium. The names of the pieces, taken from a dictionary of
Friesian first names, reflect the humanity and singularity of their scale. Perversely, names originally intended to represent people, here identify work that bears no direct reference to a particular time, place, or material subject.The names add perhaps the most superficial layer of contradiction to
her deliberate confusion of material reality and the illusion of it.
Each painting draws attention to its flatness while creating the
illusion of a unified sculptural form. In Nomno, ribbon-like forms
that appear to advance from the picture plane were created with paint
thin enough to expose the texture of the support; thick ridges of
paint separate their contours from shapes that appear to lie flat. In
Fewe, brown and black lines create the illusion of interlocking, red
dodecahedrons defined by sculptural relief; they simultaneously
suggest that those forms are floating above, within, or behind the
picture plane. The dominant shapes in Lübbe look decorative in the
manner of printed clothing, drawing attention to the cloth of the
support while representing a fabric independently; they provocatively
straddle a line between shapes that define form and shapes that define
a surface pattern exclusively. Similarly, her color choices in each
piece feel at once dyspeptic, grave, and playful. These contradictions
encourage a confusing synaesthetic awareness. You glimpse the feeling
of holding the brown itself of a ribbon in Nomno while knowing that
you could only hold the painting.The ridges of underlying paint so apparent in the paintings often seem
to be manipulated and are often byproducts of revision; together with
the visibly layered edges of many canvasses, they give the pieces a
continuous temporal dimension. In an interview with Peter Doig in 2004
that accompanies the exhibition, Abts remarks, "I work on each over a
long period of time; there are many layers of establishing something,
then many layers of getting to know what I have established and trying
different options. The final painting is a concentrate of the many
paintings underneath." The pieces appear at once timeless and
disconcertingly contingent. You feel a part of a process of inevitable
geological accumulation and compression; conversely, the process can
feel shockingly relative, as if coherence of any sort were accidental.
