Lot 52 AAbstract Masterworks from a Distinguished Private Collection
TOMMA ABTS (B. 1967)
Uke
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Estimate
USD 200,000–300,000
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Specialist note
“Every time I make a painting it’s about starting with nothing and trying to invent something new. (T. Abts, quoted in L. Buck, “Interview with Tomma Abts, Champion of Abstraction,” The Art Newspaper, December 31, 2005).
In Uke, the German-born and London-based artist Tomma Abts creates beautiful and mysterious forms, resulting in a canvas that epitomizes her rigorous, decades-long examination of painting. Red, orange, black, and organic hues create an earthy, clay-like landscape that seems to extend to infinity despite being bounded by the edges of the canvas. The scene is overlaid with square forms, like stacked picture frames. The artist’s intuitive process is evident as she interweaves snaking red ribbons throughout the scene. In keeping with Abts’s time-intensive process, there is a sense of addition and growth, as if the canvas is in a continual process of transformation. Uke, one of the artist’s most intriguing canvases, creates an entire world from sparse colors and shapes, proving her unparalleled command of painting. As Abts observes, “Every time I make a painting it’s about starting with nothing and trying to invent something new. I always develop a painting as an entity, I have to go through this whole new discovery process every time I make a painting so for me they feel like individual, singular pieces” (T. Abts, quoted in L. Buck, “Interview with Tomma Abts, Champion of Abstraction,” The Art Newspaper, December 31, 2005).
This 2012 canvas sees Abts combine regimented and intuitive approaches to painting. Her canvases are 48 by 38 centimeters (about 19 x 15 inches), a conscious choice that reflects the format of a portrait and the titles of her paintings come from a dictionary of German first names. Yet within these parameters, the artist creates her vocabulary without any preconceived notions or influences, leaving ample room for the unexpected. She is known for heavily working the surfaces of her paintings, with some taking years to complete. The finest examples like Uke celebrate this level of intensity, foregrounding Abts’s subtle and expressive gestures. There is an interplay between the artist and the viewer as they are invited to look ever closer. As art historian Katy Siegel writes, “These paintings describe something rare and valuable in their complex relations between surface and image, between process and product, between her touch and our vision: the difference between the privateness of her experience and the publicness of ours, respected, not effaced, and held in tension” (K. Siegel, “Katy Siegel on Tomma Abts,” Artforum, January 2004).
Although Abts has never divulged her artistic influences, links have been made to Constructivism and Op Art, which likewise sought to reconfigure how we see the world. Uke is also related to the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who used layering of both paint and found materials to create an expanded field of sight. We might compare Uke to Braque’s Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table (1910), in which the Cubist master, like Abts, creates something both recognizable and entirely strange to us. Also relevant is the geometric rigor of Picasso’s Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912), which echoes Abts’s mixture of curves with hard-edged lines.
Abts has been internationally celebrated since becoming the first female artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2006. Uke was included in the landmark group exhibition Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists at Tate Britain and singled out for its impressive qualities, “Tomma Abts makes abstract pictures (not a contradiction in terms in her case) of great elegance and wit…Their forms – scrolling, zig-zagging, rippling, geometric, curvaceous – are endlessly various. Sometimes the surface is incised, embossed or coated like verdigris on copper, as if the image wanted to break into three dimensions. Sometimes the canvas splits in two and a deep internal shadow appears, like the box of a violin, or the shadow is a painted illusion. There are impossible perspectives and visual interplays that you can’t exactly fathom, but above all there are gorgeous metaphorical associations: the riffle of a fan, the shimmer of art deco moiré, children's tumbling blocks in constant cascade (L. Cumming, “Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists – review,” The Guardian, November 16, 2013). Abts has also mounted institutional solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2008), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011), the Aspen Art Museum (2014), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2018), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2018-2019).
A standout in her body of work, Uke vibrates as Abts creates an interplay of surface and depth. According to art historian Kate Nesin, “Concrete, but hardly static, these compact paintings crackle; mobile, electric, their forms and tones appear as if momentarily suspended before proceeding to slide past or bump against one another, to dim or brighten” (K. Nesin, Tomma Abts, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago and Serpentine Galleries, Chicago and London, 2018, p. 19). The same could be said of Uke, whose marks build up into something like musical notes, and the sound will be totally unique for each viewer.
In Uke, the German-born and London-based artist Tomma Abts creates beautiful and mysterious forms, resulting in a canvas that epitomizes her rigorous, decades-long examination of painting. Red, orange, black, and organic hues create an earthy, clay-like landscape that seems to extend to infinity despite being bounded by the edges of the canvas. The scene is overlaid with square forms, like stacked picture frames. The artist’s intuitive process is evident as she interweaves snaking red ribbons throughout the scene. In keeping with Abts’s time-intensive process, there is a sense of addition and growth, as if the canvas is in a continual process of transformation. Uke, one of the artist’s most intriguing canvases, creates an entire world from sparse colors and shapes, proving her unparalleled command of painting. As Abts observes, “Every time I make a painting it’s about starting with nothing and trying to invent something new. I always develop a painting as an entity, I have to go through this whole new discovery process every time I make a painting so for me they feel like individual, singular pieces” (T. Abts, quoted in L. Buck, “Interview with Tomma Abts, Champion of Abstraction,” The Art Newspaper, December 31, 2005).
This 2012 canvas sees Abts combine regimented and intuitive approaches to painting. Her canvases are 48 by 38 centimeters (about 19 x 15 inches), a conscious choice that reflects the format of a portrait and the titles of her paintings come from a dictionary of German first names. Yet within these parameters, the artist creates her vocabulary without any preconceived notions or influences, leaving ample room for the unexpected. She is known for heavily working the surfaces of her paintings, with some taking years to complete. The finest examples like Uke celebrate this level of intensity, foregrounding Abts’s subtle and expressive gestures. There is an interplay between the artist and the viewer as they are invited to look ever closer. As art historian Katy Siegel writes, “These paintings describe something rare and valuable in their complex relations between surface and image, between process and product, between her touch and our vision: the difference between the privateness of her experience and the publicness of ours, respected, not effaced, and held in tension” (K. Siegel, “Katy Siegel on Tomma Abts,” Artforum, January 2004).
Although Abts has never divulged her artistic influences, links have been made to Constructivism and Op Art, which likewise sought to reconfigure how we see the world. Uke is also related to the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who used layering of both paint and found materials to create an expanded field of sight. We might compare Uke to Braque’s Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table (1910), in which the Cubist master, like Abts, creates something both recognizable and entirely strange to us. Also relevant is the geometric rigor of Picasso’s Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912), which echoes Abts’s mixture of curves with hard-edged lines.
Abts has been internationally celebrated since becoming the first female artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2006. Uke was included in the landmark group exhibition Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists at Tate Britain and singled out for its impressive qualities, “Tomma Abts makes abstract pictures (not a contradiction in terms in her case) of great elegance and wit…Their forms – scrolling, zig-zagging, rippling, geometric, curvaceous – are endlessly various. Sometimes the surface is incised, embossed or coated like verdigris on copper, as if the image wanted to break into three dimensions. Sometimes the canvas splits in two and a deep internal shadow appears, like the box of a violin, or the shadow is a painted illusion. There are impossible perspectives and visual interplays that you can’t exactly fathom, but above all there are gorgeous metaphorical associations: the riffle of a fan, the shimmer of art deco moiré, children's tumbling blocks in constant cascade (L. Cumming, “Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists – review,” The Guardian, November 16, 2013). Abts has also mounted institutional solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2008), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011), the Aspen Art Museum (2014), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2018), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2018-2019).
A standout in her body of work, Uke vibrates as Abts creates an interplay of surface and depth. According to art historian Kate Nesin, “Concrete, but hardly static, these compact paintings crackle; mobile, electric, their forms and tones appear as if momentarily suspended before proceeding to slide past or bump against one another, to dim or brighten” (K. Nesin, Tomma Abts, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago and Serpentine Galleries, Chicago and London, 2018, p. 19). The same could be said of Uke, whose marks build up into something like musical notes, and the sound will be totally unique for each viewer.