As the winner of the 2006 Turner Prize, Tomma Abts’s abstract works have become known for their stubborn muteness. This continues in this presentation of new paintings and pencil drawings from the past two years. Neither referencing their painterly peerage, nor recollecting past movements, her paintings resist talking about other art. Perhaps most importantly, they are not about, and neither do they present, information. They appear homeless, then, cut off from the noisy, transitory, documentary-drenched glut of artistic creativity that currently dominates the landscape.
Following a labour-intensive process of accrual, Abts’s paintings are imbued with a striking thing-ness. Perhaps they are best understood as the sum of a bundle of decisions – lines marked and masked, brushstrokes applied and re-worked, and colours enhanced or paled. Sticking with her modest portrait-format, paintings ‘Uphe’, ‘Ihme’ and ‘Solms’, see forms and shadows emerge from planes of teal, mustard and grey. Evincing the interplay that comes with the application of many of layers of paint, these works carry with them traces of their own history.
Abts’s inclusion of the new pencil works causes a jolt. Nine drawings of red and yellow lines running across wide expanses of untouched paper, they appear in contrast to the dense, gem-like paintings. In these variously numbered ‘Untitled’ works, depth results from illusion, as opposed to the cumulative effects of months of painting. Whilst playing with lines is no great departure for Abts – this new body of work even sees her split a pair of her canvases into two parts, incorporating the resulting line into her composition – these drawings and paintings place new emphasise on a register of material weights. In this exhibition, ideas of lightness and load, and finitude and process, come to the fore.