NYAB Event - Tomma Abts Exhibition

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At The New Museum of Contemporary Art
Media: Painting

The New Museum introduces the first major U.S. solo exhibition of
paintings by London-based artist Tomma Abts (born Kiel, Germany, 1967). Abts creates paintings that confound expectation. Small, severe, and abstract, Abts’ work is an antidote to the florid figuration that has dominated the contemporary painting discourse for the last decade. As one of the leaders of a resurgent abstract vocabulary, she has found a language that is not merely abstract, but also absolutist and visionary. “Tomma Abts” includes fifteen paintings created over the past ten years and will be on view through June 29. The exhibition is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Abts’ works are modest in size but extremely ambitious. While other painters have typically ramped up the proportions of their canvases, Abts’ paintings measure a mere 18 7/8 by 15 inches (48 x 38 cm).
They are also profoundly nonrepresentational—their meaning only conveyed by color and line, without reference to the already existing visual world. Abts’ colors are often indescribable, and her combinations can be muted or charged, daring viewers to recalibrate their assumptions about color. In the present contemporary art climate, her paintings seem strange, aberrant, if not a bit shocking. In their stab at profundity though, they are also relevant in some fundamental way to our anxious times.

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