Small Is Beautiful

In an era when so much new art is blandly referential, if not blatantly appropriated, it's refreshing to come across the intimate, abstract work of Tomma Abts, a German-born painter based in England. While many artists find inspiration for abstraction in nature, everyday objects, or even the human form, Abts is adamant that she mines only her subconscious in creating her sophisticated compositions of swirls and zigzags, circles and triangles. "It just wouldn't interest me, taking something and putting it on canvas," she says from her central London studio, with just a whiff of an accent. "It makes me happy to start with just a color or a shape."

Abts, who took home the Turner Prize in 2006 and has an exhibition of recent work opening at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf on July 16, applies acrylics and oils in layer upon stream-of-consciousness layer, a virtual William Faulkner or James Joyce for the gallery set. Her method is like that of a writer obsessively revising, and evidence of her many drafts is often visible. "It's all about clarifying, fine-tuning," she says. A creature of habit, she sticks to one canvas size 38 by 48 centimeters, or just under 15 by 19 inches – and positions it vertically, which lends it the flavor of a private portrait; these self-imposed restrictions give her the freedom to add constantly to what she calls her "canon of elements. Recently I've been doing a lot with stripes," she reports, noting that they provide a sense of movement and direction. "Not lines, but stipes. The stripes is huge."

So, it appears, is the audience for Abts's paintings. Her pieces, with price tags around $120,000, routinely sell out at Greengrassi in London and David Zwirner in New York. Critics seem equally smitten, raving, for example about the artist's 2008 solo show at the New Museum in Manhattan. But their occasional use of the word retro has irked her. "The only way they could explain [my paintings] was by quoting from the past," she says, "because they did not know what to make of them."

Cringing at the thought of being "didactic," Abts demurs from spelling out what she hopes viewers of her work will take away. But there are plenty of clues right on the surface: These paintings are about painting.