Aida Tomescu: With the Crimson Word

4 Oct-28 Oct 2023

Overview

Flowers Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition by Sydney-based artist Aida Tomescu, her first solo exhibition in the UK.

One of Australia's foremost abstract painters, Aida Tomescu's career has spanned over 40 years. Her works combine a vital physical presence with a powerful handling of scale, to create what she describes as "living structures", self-forming from within.

The title of this exhibition is a quotation from a poem by Paul Celan, underlining the important connection Tomescu sees between the cadence and structure of language and painting. Tomescu's works have long incorporated literary references, generating their rhythm during the journey of their making. They develop connections between multiple sources, always charged by the present. Tomescu describes Celan's verse as "the poetic frame" of this series of works, in which associative thinking generates new and often unexpected forms.

Tomescu's works are constructed through a rigorous process of building and veiling with films of pigment, scraping back and excavating the surface of the canvas over long periods of time. Progressively, the paintings develop a clear direction while becoming increasingly complex, a journey in which the painting "travels the distance" to achieve unity and resolution. She describes each work as a set of internal relationships, in which each plane of construction, form, and painterly incident is always connected to the ground. Tomescu says, “The ground is always an active participant in the work. A central character in recent times, the revealed areas of linen, engage with all the other protagonists, from the upper side of my paintings; its presence in stark contrast with the characters building in the work. Yet it can only exist and function through the passages and the spaces in-between, the openings, the pauses between and behind the forms we see."