The strange, small paintings of Tomma Abts act like artistic stealth bombers. The German born, London based artist was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize and over the years she’s become renowned as a quiet force in abstract painting. Her deceptively unassuming work has continued to exert its slow-burning power over an evermore appreciative international audience, even though there is nothing flashy or retina-sizzling about these peculiar little canvases. With their oddly indefinable palette and arrangements of circles, stripes, triangles and curves, they often seem more like the work of some long-forgotten Futurist or a 1930s Bauhaus member, rather than one of today’s most sought-after contemporary artists.
But don’t be taken in by their low profile demeanour, for as Abts’s most recent paintings currently on show at Greengrassi confirm, what appear to be straightforward relationships of form and colour are actually quite the opposite. Each work is built up from intricate overpaintings with previous traces left under the skin. The shapes emerge out of and retreat back into the picture plane with a perplexing lack of logic. Flashes of vivid colour and incongruous shadows play across their thick smothering layers; these intricate maskings, shadings and spatial games complicate the picture plane in mind-boggling ways.
Another paradox is that, while they might appear to have been elaborately pre-meditated, in fact their geometric compositions are created intuitively – albeit laboriously. “I have no preconceptions when I start, there are no drawings that I do before,” Abts states. “I don’t work out the composition beforehand... It can take a very long time to make everything work but I’m making it up as I go along: the whole mood, the colour scheme, everything can totally change.”
Although her paintings might carry echoes of Modernist art history, that’s not remotely the artist’s intention. “What I do is definitely not about finding references and mixing them together in a new way,” she says. “Every time I make a painting it is about starting with nothing and trying to invent something new.”