Aida Tomescu

Last updated

Aida Tomescu
Born (1955-10-03) 3 October 1955 (age 68)
Bucharest, Romania
NationalityAustralian
Known forPainting, drawing, contemporary art
Awards2003 Dobell Prize for Drawing
2001 Wynne Prize
1996 Sir John Sulman Prize
Website Aida Tomescu

Aida Tomescu (born October 1955) is an Australian contemporary artist [1] [2] who is known for her abstract paintings, collages, drawings and prints. Tomescu is a winner of the Dobell Prize for Drawing, the Wynne Prize for Landscape and the Sir John Sulman Prize, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. [3] [4] [5] [6]

Contents

Early life and education

Tomescu was born in October 1955 in Bucharest, Romania where she lived until age 23. She arrived in Australia one year later, in May 1980. She studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in the early 1970s. The Institute in Bucharest provided its students with academic training focusing on the structure, composition, and overall approach to making works (Hart, 2006, 10). [1]  In 1977 she graduated with a diploma in painting and two years later she had her first solo exhibition. In 1983 she completed a post-graduate diploma in visual arts at the City Art Institute in Sydney.

The seed of her career as a painter became planted in Aida Tomescu while studying at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in the late 1970's , when she closely studied the work of Cezanne and his legacy through cubism. She read Kandinsky's famous essay, 'Concerning the spiritual in art' ... When she emigrated to Australia from Romania and took up study at the City Art Institute in Sydney in 1980 she was ripe for a dedication to abstract painting from which she never wavered (Barry Pearce ' 100 moments of Australian painting' 2014, page 216).

Career

Tomescu's work gradually evolved towards abstraction. Tomescu said: "One of the first things that happened here is that I bought bigger canvases, I increased the scale. Though I was continuing as a painter, I needed a whole new vocabulary, and this would only develop gradually." [7] Tomescu's works are influenced by a variety of sources. For example, in an interview with Tomescu in February 2020, Angela Goddard wrote that Tomescu's "in depth knowledge and intimate study of art history- she explores the way Proto and Early Renaissance Italian artists, Giotto and Fra Angelico, through to Renaissance painters Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini and Titan construct their paintings and the rich content of their work" as influential on Tomescu's painting (Goddard, February, 2020). Her work has also been informed by Paul Cézanne and cubism, and the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky expressed in his 1910 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. [8]

In 1986 Tomescu was invited to the Victorian Print Workshop, now the Australian Print Workshop. As an artist who regarded drawing as an important part of her practice, she found the experience of working with etching plates liberating as she had to "curb any craving for precision and for controlling an image". At the same time, Tomescu "loved its transformative powers over my drawing, the way in which it liberated my drawing in the acid tray. Materiality was removed entirely by the acid, so I was left with an image that is really vulnerable, open." [7]

Tomescu is represented by Flowers Gallery and Jensen Gallery.

Exhibitions

Tomescu held her first exhibition "based on still-life" in 1979, in Bucharest. [7] She has exhibited regularly in Australia and internationally, with over 30 solo exhibitions to date. [9]

From 1985 to 1995, she was exhibiting at the Coventry Gallery, Sydney with "regular solo shows of her dark abstract paintings". [10]

In 1987 Tomescu exhibited in Canberra at the Ben Grady Gallery. Sasha Grishin, senior art critic for The Canberra Times found her work to be in "a bit of a time warp" back to a time when abstract expressionism was the "dominant style" and the challenge for the artist would be, after "redisovering" abstract expressionism, to "build on it and create their own unique style". [11]

In 1991, a smaller version of the Art Gallery of New South Wales touring exhibition Abstraction was shown at the Nolan Gallery, Lanyon ACT. Art critic Sonia Barron, writing for The Canberra Times, was disappointed in the exhibition but found at least that Tomescu communicated "a spiritual anxiety in her dark expressionist canvases". [12]

In 1994, the art collector and art gallery owner Chandler Coventry showed a collection of 300 prints he had acquired in the exhibition Obsession. The diverse collection of works included 10 works by Aida Tomescu and art critic Sasha Grishin remarked that her worked "places her as one of the leading exponents of gestural abstraction in this country". [13]

In 2009 her work was the subject of a major survey exhibition, Aida Tomescu: Paintings and Drawings at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University. [14] [15] [16] Art critic John McDonald expressed admiration for Tomescu's "sense of colour and surface texture". He referred to the paint being laid on in "concrete-like slabs" with the works on paper consisting of a "frenzied mass of squiggles and disjointed calligraphy" and found the body of work "alive and convincing". [16]

Tomescu's graphic works were included in the major survey of prints and drawings Out of Australia at the British Museum, London in 2011. [8]

Tomescu's work was included in a major touring exhibition, Abstraction: Celebrating Australian Women Abstract Artists, a touring exhibition (2017–2019) from the National Gallery of Australia. [17]

Other exhibitions include The Triumph of Modernism at TarraWarra Museum of Art, [18] Art Basel Hong Kong (2019, 2018, 2017 & 2015), Wet, Wet, Wet, Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland (2019) The Anatomy of Gesture, Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland (2017); Chromoffection, Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland (2016), 'The Heide Collection’, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2015); Vibrant Matter, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2013), The Mind’s Eye, Art Gallery of South Australia (2013), Forever Young, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2011), and Contemporary Encounters, Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria (2010).

Critical reception

Australian art historian Patrick McCaughey writes of Tomescu in his 2014 book Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters:

[One] of the best painters at work in Australia today, Aida Tomescu has revived a full-throated painterly abstraction, where colour and gesture flow through the work...she knits over and under surfaces in which the light and colour seem to be pulsing from within the work, not just laid on top. You feel her presence and her sensibility, moment to moment on the surface, in the painting. [1]

Art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald John McDonald wrote on August 25, 2012:

Aida Tomescu, who is consolidating a reputation as one of Australia's most formidable living abstract painters...is making the point that she is not interested in arbitrary "mark-making" — she is after something she calls an "image". Even though most people might associate this word with a recognisable object, Tomescu's image is very different. It seems closer to the image of Christ or the Virgin in Byzantine art, which was meant to embody the presence of the holy being in the work. [19] [20]

Christopher Allen in Art in Australia from Colonization to Postmodernism wrote:

"Aida Tomescu’s paintings…draws us into the intense concentration of its own making…(she) starts with energy and movement and seems to be trying to do the near-impossible — to reach stillness from such a starting-point." [21]

Awards and commissions

Collections

Related Research Articles

John Walker is an English painter and printmaker. He has been called "one of the standout abstract painters of the last 50 years."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Hester</span> Australian artist (1920–1960)

Joy St Clair Hester was an Australian artist. She was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism. Hester is best known for her bold and expressive ink drawings. Her work was charged with a heightened awareness of mortality due to the death of her father during her childhood, the threat of war, and her personal experience with Hodgkin's disease. Hester is most well known for the series Face, Sleep, and Love (1948–49) as well as the later works, The Lovers (1956–58).

Janet Dawson MBE is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960s, having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England while she lived in Europe 1957–1960 She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists, a theatre-set and furniture designer. She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, Michael Boddy Reading. She has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections. In 1977 she was awarded an MBE for services to art.

Grace Adela Williams Crowley was an Australian artist and modernist painter.

Elisabeth Cummings is an Australian artist known for her large abstract paintings and printmaking. She has won numerous awards including Fleurieu Art Prize, The Portia Geach Portrait Prize, The Mosman Art Prize, and The Tattersalls Art Prize. Her work is owned in permanent collections across Australia including Artbank, The Queensland Art Gallery, The Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is notable for receiving recognition later in her career, considered by the Australian Art Collector as one of the 50 most collectible Australian Artists.

Robert Jacks was an Australian painter, sculptor and printmaker.

Sylvia Snowden is an African American abstract painter who works with acrylics, oil pastels, and mixed media to create textured works that convey the "feel of paint". Many museums have hosted her art in exhibits, while several have added her works to their permanent collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moya Dyring</span> Australian artist (1909–1967)

Moya Dyring was an Australian artist. She was one of the first women artists to embrace Modernism and exhibit cubist paintings in Melbourne. For several years she was a member of the modern art community known as the Heide Circle, named after the home of art collectors John and Sunday Reed, and now the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Dyring then travelled to the USA and France, where she lived most her life. Her work is held in the Heide Museum as well as the National Gallery of Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gareth Sansom</span>

Gareth Sansom is an Australian artist, painter, printmaker and collagist and winner of the 2008 John McCaughey Memorial Prize of $100,000.

Margel Ina Harris Hinder was an Australian-American modernist sculptor, noted for her kinetic and public sculptural works. Her sculptures are found outside the Australian Reserve Bank building in Martin Place, Sydney, in a memorial in Newcastle, New South Wales, and in Canberra, ACT. Her work is held in several Australian public collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Bellette</span> Australian artist (1908–1991)

Jean Bellette was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.

Ann Thomson is an Australian painter and sculptor. She is best known for her large-scale public commissions Ebb Tide (1987) for the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre and Australia Felix (1992) for the Seville World Expo. In 1998 she won the [Art Gallery of New South Wales' Wynne Prize. Her work is held in national and international collections, including: the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid and Villa Haiss Museum, Germany.

Gemma Smith is an Australian painter and sculptor, who is Sydney-based. Smith has been the recipient of numerous grants and been invited to join multiple exhibitions. She is known for her continuous experimentations with colour and abstraction. Her work is held in museum, corporate and private collections across Australia.

Sanné Mestrom is an Australian experimental and conceptual artist who works mainly in the mediums of installation and sculpture. Mestrom has a research-based practice and incorporates notions of "play" into social aspects of urban design. Since 2011, Mestrom has remade and reinterpreted motifs from the twentieth century modernist art canon. She has earned many grants and has been commissioned to execute public art, sculptures in situ. She has studied in Korea and Mexico, and is a senior lecturer at Sydney College of Art.

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn is a Laotian-born Australian visual artist. She immigrated with her parents as a seven-year old, and through studies and travel has integrated Laotian, Vietnamese and Australian influences in her art. Her art reflects cross-cultural influences in contemporary Australia as she fuses her personal experiences, dual cultures, and painterly abstraction. She has exhibited widely in Australia and Singapore, and her works are held in major state and regional galleries across Australia. She was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize 2016 and the Moet & Chandon art prize in 1998. She lives and works in Canberra.

Marie Hagerty is an Australian artist, painter, sculptor and teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Field (exhibition)</span> Influential Australian exhibition of abstract art held in 1968

The Field was the inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s new premises on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Launched by the director of London’s Tate gallery, Norman Reid, before an audience of 1,000 invitees, it was held between held 21 August and 28 September 1968. Hailed then, and regarded since as a landmark exhibition in Australian art history, it presented the first comprehensive display of colour field painting and abstract sculpture in the country in a radical presentation, between silver foil–covered walls and under geometric light fittings, of 74 works by 40 artists. All practised hard-edge, geometric, colour and flat abstraction, often in novel media including coloured or transparent plastic, fluorescent acrylic paints, steel and chrome. The art was appropriate to a launch of the new venue itself, designed by architect Roy Grounds, and emphatically rectilinear; cubes nested in a basalt rectangular box amongst the other buildings of the new Arts Centre, each based on a geometric solid. Echoing emerging international stylistic tendencies of the time, The Field sparked immediate controversy and launched the careers of a new generation of Australian artists.

Sandra Leveson, also known as Sandra Leveson-Meares, is an Australian painter, printmaker, and teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Dredge</span> Australian artist (1928–2001)

Margaret Anne Dredge was an Australian painter and printmaker, active from the mid-1950s until 1997, and teacher of art.

Allan Mitelman is an Australian painter, printmaker and art teacher who arrived in Australia in 1953.

References

  1. 1 2 3 McCaughey, Patrick (2014). Strange country : why Australian painting matters. Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press. ISBN   9780522861204.
  2. McCulloch, Alan; & McCulloch, Susan. Encyclopedia of Australian art. 1994 St Leonards, NSW : Allen & Unwin (3rd revised edition), pp. 703–704.
  3. "McCubbin: Last Impressions & Aida Tomescu". John McDonald. 24 October 2009. Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  4. Stephens, Andrew (12 December 2014). "Australian painters are still the stars of the art scene". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  5. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 March 2016. Retrieved 5 December 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. Pearce, Barry. '100 Moments in Australian Painting', 2014, NewSouth Publishing, in association with the Art Gallery of NSW
  7. 1 2 3 "Aida Tomescu". artistprofile.com.au. 30 August 2017. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  8. 1 2 "Collections Online". British Museum .
  9. "Aida Tomescu". aidatomescu.com. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  10. "Collections Online". British Museum . Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  11. "ART Back to the days of abstract expressionism". The Canberra Times . 4 September 1987. p. 10. Retrieved 16 August 2020 via Trove.
  12. "Abstracted collection Incomplete". The Canberra Times . 16 February 1991. p. 5. Retrieved 16 August 2020 via Trove.
  13. "ARTS". The Canberra Times . 21 May 1994. p. 49. Retrieved 16 August 2020 via Trove.
  14. "Aida Tomescu: Paintings And Drawings". Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University. Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  15. Grishin, Sasha. "Power in the Individual Vision", The Canberra Times , 20 October 2009
  16. 1 2 McDonald, John (24 October 2009). "Mccubbin: Last impressions & Aida Tomescu". Sydney Morning Herald.
  17. "Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists". National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  18. "No lemons here - The Spectator". Archived from the original on 24 September 2015.
  19. McDonald, John. "Wild and Wondrous", Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald , August 25, 2012
  20. McDonald, John. "Pathways to other worlds", The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 2007
  21. Allen, Christopher (1997). Art in Australia from Colonization to Postmodernism. New York: Thames & Hudson.
  22. "Sir John Sulman Prize finalists 1996". Art Gallery of New South Wales. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  23. "Wynne Prize finalists 2001 :: Art Gallery NSW". Art Gallery of New South Wales. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  24. "Artist lights up drawing prize". The Sydney Morning Herald . 11 September 2003. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  25. "Aida Tomescu" (PDF). jensengallery.
  26. Sullivan+Strumpf (2017). "Eyes in the heat: Exhibition catalogue" (PDF). Sullivan+Strumpf. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  27. "Aida Tomescu: Painting as process". Art Collector Magazine. 16 October 2015. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  28. Tomescu, Aida Loane. "Alba II". Item held by National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  29. Tomescu, Aida Loane. "Ithaca V". Item held by National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  30. "Aida TOMESCU | Artists | NGV". www.ngv.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 24 August 2020.
  31. "Works by Aida Tomescu :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW". www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 24 August 2020.
  32. "Zattere/Margherita". Auckland Art Gallery. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  33. "Collections Search – Tomescu". British Museum . Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  34. "QAGOMA search: Aida Tomescu" . Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  35. "AGSA Annual Report 2017" (PDF). 2017. p. 29.

The Gallery of South Australia Magazine: Issue 52 Spring 2023.

Further reading