Currently on view at David Zwirner’s 519 19th Street Space in New York, Tomma Abts is presenting a body of new paintings and drawings, a new entry in her ongoing practice involving flux, change and construction over the course of the compositional process. Under formal analysis, Abts’s work is rooted in the history of 20th Century abstraction, colorful shapes and lines converging in a studious and well-executed canvas that exploits its own relations to its surrounding space as much as the picture plane itself, but upon closer inspection, the works on view here often offer a much deeper narrative.
Abts’s process is best described as “time-intensive,” beginning each canvas without a predetermined goal, and rather, arriving at the final work through a series of trial and error experiments. Lines and marks are covered over, altered or erased, often leaving behind trace evidence that holds together a cohesive, albeit occasionally flawed, history of the painting’s construction. In one work, an concealed layer of paint makes itself explicit through a thick line on the surface of the work, its presence felt just below the final piece. In another, colors are altered and shifted to create different layers of depth, occasionally failing to fit lockstep into the reasoning of Abts’s compositions.
As a result, the works take on a potent new role, illustrating not only Abts’s complex spatial politics, but the agency she affords the canvas itself in her work against it. Her process is not merely a method or realization of arriving at the final composition through a series of experiments, but rather, a gradual mapping out of the possibilities themselves. Her works present not only a series of constructivist experiments, but a willingness to engage with paint and canvas on their own terms, as well as with past iterations of her own creative impulses.
Interestingly, Abts often moves beyond the surface of her work, cutting off edges of her canvas, or in one case, separating a work so that it stands exhibited with a sliver of white wall between its two segments. In these incisions, Abts reintroduces a certain uncertainty as to the composition and process. The elements missing from the rectangular canvas may have held mistakes, or may have been a deliberate subtraction. In either case, the work’s logic must contend for itself, outside of the artist’s aesthetic choices.