Liliane Tomasko is a New York-based Swiss artist. Her abstract paintings transform the creases of everyday fabrics into meditations on the nature of sleep, dreams, and the unconscious.
Read MoreLiliane Tomasko was born in Zurich, Switzerland. She completed her formal education in London, receiving a BA from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and an MA from the Royal Academy of Arts.
For over 20 years, Tomasko has held an interest in sleep, dreams, and the unconscious. She began her artistic career by producing figurative oil paintings. Taking bedsheets, curtains, and clothing as her subject matter, she painted melancholy still lifes of domestic interiors in oil. Finding metaphorical meaning in the textiles, she drew closer to the creases in the fabric she portrayed. Before long, the folds and wrinkles of her subject material gave way to abstract loops and lines.
Tomasko begins her paintings by taking photographs of domestic objects, her most frequent subject being the unmade bed. As a point of reference, the photographs provide a scaffold for the painted image. Following the lines made by rumbled fabric, Tomasko uses acrylic paint and spray paint to build up gestural lines and interweaving shapes until the originally depicted object is no longer recognisable.
The unmade bed is a common motif in Liliane Tomasko's paintings. Much like her early paintings of darkened interiors, the motif acts as a metaphor for the inner world. Using the abandoned morning bed as her point of departure, Tomasko's paintings explore the hidden nature of our sleeping life, and the inaccessibility of dreams in our waking hours.
For her solo exhibition We Sleep Where We Fall (2021) at KEWENIG, Berlin Tomasko presented a number of large-scale canvases and smaller works on paper, aluminium, and linen. Many of the works comprised grand, looping gestures rendered in contrasting palettes. Hold on to Yourself: 5/31/2020 (2020) depicts sweeping, interweaving lines of black and grey against a background of spray-painted streams of pigment. Another painting, entitled a secret that wasn't (2019), combines bold, defined brushstrokes with areas of blurred colour.
Through the tension between depth and focus, colour and tone, Liliane Tomasko's paintings describe the varied accessibility of our deepest feelings, fears, and desires: locked out of consciousness by day but illuminated by night.
Liliane Tomasko's work is held in private and public collections worldwide, including The Albertina, Vienna; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, Liechtenstein; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Kunstmuseum Bern; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, Germany; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, U.S.A.
Her solo exhibitions include Amygdala, KEWENIG, Palma de Mallorca (2019); The Red Thread, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2019); Liliane Tomasko, Marc Straus Gallery, New York (2019); Caja de Sueños, Mario Testino Museum, Lima (2018); Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami (2015); In Visible World, Phoenix Art Museum, U.S.A. (2015); and Luminous Matter, Casal Solleric, Palma de Majorca (2011).
Liliane Tomasko's group exhibitions include Double-M, Double-X, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2020); Warhol to Richter: From the Collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2019); Abstract Painting Now!, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2017); Sleepless: The Bed in History and Contemporary Art, 21er Haus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2015); and 20 Years of K20: Art of the 20th Century, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2006).
Liliane Tomasko's husband is painter Sean Scully. The couple live and work in between Germany and New York.
Liliane Tomasko's Instagram account can be found here.
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021
