Overview
We are pleased to present a solo show at Art Basel Hong Kong by Aida Tomesco Torn through the white
IFPDA Print Fair - Park Avenue Armory
Keeping things fluid, layered and evolving have been constants in Tomescu’s use of mixed media and collage. Here the...richness of materials and gestures suggest an uncanny sense of something old, accumulated over time, and something fresh and vital in the present.
States of Becoming, Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Australia
Flowers Gallery is delighted to participate in this year’s edition of the IFPDA Print Fair with a special solo presentation by celebrated artist Aida Tomescu. The booth will highlight her ever evolving process through etching, drawing and painting. This exhibition centres on Tomescu’s high-energy series of new drawings ‘Torn through the white’, completed in 2025, presented alongside a selection of Tomescu’s editioned aquatint and intaglio etchings and her recent major painting ‘With the crimson word’ with its intense, raptured surface, echoing the unpredictable construction of her collages. The presentation invites dialogues between media and emphasises the ways in which Tomescu’s drawings are progressively layered, expansive and informed by colour, like the paintings, while drawing is increasingly entering Tomescu’s larger paintings.
One of Australia’s foremost abstract painters, Aida Tomescu’s work projects a compelling presence with a powerful sense of scale and fearlessness. Throughout her career spanning over 40 years, she has been developing and enlarging the themes and content of her work, to arrive at ‘live structures’ forming from within. Tomescu says, Ultimately nothing is fixed in painting, etching or collage. Even though you break through with a line deeply into an etching ground, the aim is for the image to lift off that surface, have a pulse.
‘Torn through the white’, the new series of drawings by Aida Tomescu, takes its title from Thomas Bernhard’s early volume of poetry ‘Under the Iron of the Moon’. 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 Bernhard’s verse as “the poetic frame” of her new collage & mixed media series.
I turn to something very specific, at times to literature and poetry. It triggers new material that is incorporated and has to be constructed. One source, one theme, generates associative thinking and connections that give me entry into the work, ignites a new direction, multiplying the potential. The surface slowly discards what is unnecessary, sheds what doesn’t clarify my construction. Gradually the work becomes more and more complex and gives me a lot to consider, to reflect on– a lot to do.
Drawing is central to Tomescu’s thinking. It exists alongside her paintings, in the service of form and structure. It is never preparatory and has become a welcomed intrusion in her larger paintings. While the works from this series preserve a look of utmost spontaneity, they are the result of a coordinated, gradual construction, and a rigorous critical appraisal of the overall, and of the resolution of each image.
In each new series, regardless of media, there is a persistent interplay between intensity and lightness of touch, a nerviness of gesture, along with an impulse to blow predictable configurations sky-high, unsettle the work’s structure and recast in a new complex and surprising way.
Drawing keeps my work in the midst of discovery, allows me to find and retain a purer voice in the course of the work, and let the image whistle in an unexpected tune.
Torn through the white I - VI, 2024 - 2025
I turn to something very specific, at times to literature and poetry. It triggers new material that is incorporated and has to be constructed. One source, one theme, generates associative thinking and connections that give me entry into the work, ignites a new direction, multiplying the potential. The surface slowly discards what is unnecessary, sheds what doesn’t clarify my construction. Gradually the work becomes more and more complex and gives me a lot to consider, to reflect on– a lot to do.
Seria Neagra I-IV, 1999, Photography Courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
There is so much life in Tomescu’s drawings. At first glance a large series of evocative drawings may appear like impassioned expressions – fast and spontaneous. Yet each work in the series has evolved gradually over time: built up layer upon layer, the drawn lines probing space and overlapping, rubbed back into soft veils, continually remade afresh. The vibrant force-fields are there, certainly, but this is a compressed energy that has emerged after a considerable genesis – made possible as a result of what has come before.
- Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Australia
With the Crimson Word, Installation view at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, 2023 Vis a Vis, 2023 & Chartres, 2023, Private Collections, London & New York
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