HAYLEY TOMPKINS

For Tompkins the act of painting is a process of thinking and exploring, rather than as a means to simply produce paintings. Her work attempts to find new ways to challenge and explore painting’s transformational possibilities, in order to construct a balance between the pictorial and the physical.

Fluctuating between sensual, organic marks, and those that are angular, repetitive, and orderly, Tompkins employs these conflicting languages of mark-making to create images that are both serious and playful - the product of multiple acts of insertion, deletion, and transformation. The resulting images provoke our inherent desire to rationalize images, but firmly defy categorization, encouraging the viewer to engage with the works on their own terms, with feeling rather than reason, and as both an image and an object.

Text courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery.