Aida Tomescu

Aida Tomescu (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, all auspiced by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

Aida Tomescu
Born
Aida Tomescu

1955
Bucharest, Romania
NationalityAustralian
Known forPainting, Drawing, Contemporary art
Awards2003 Dobell Prize for Drawing
2001 Wynne Prize
1996 Sir John Sulman Prize
WebsiteAida Tomescu

Aida Tomescu is represented by Fox Jensen Gallery Sydney and Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland.

Early life and Education

'Tomescu was born and brought up in Bucharest in Romania. She trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest where the students drew the same subject repeatedly from plaster casts, initially working in pencil and then in charcoal. In 1977 she graduated with a diploma in painting and two years later she had her first solo exhibition in Bucharest.'

Text from Stephen Coppel, 'Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas', BMP, 2011.

‘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 1970s , 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. NewSouth Publishing.[12]

Career

'Arriving in Sydney at the age of twenty five, she began to make collages of torn up paper...Her work was shown in Sydney in various group exhibitions, including one of women artists at Gallery A in 1982 and another titled 'A Different Perspective' at Artspace in 1983. After completing a graduate diploma of art at the City Art Institute in Sydney in 1983, she had regular solo shows of her dark abstract paintings at Coventry Gallery in Sydney over ten years from 1985 to 1995. Cool neutral tones of slate blue and grey dominated her paintings of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2003 she won the Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for 'Negru III' and 'Negru IV' ('A candle in a dark room'), a pair of drawings in white pastel over deeply etched black prints made the previous year. A radical change of palette to fiery reds and shrill yellows governs her paintings from the mid-2000s in which the highly charged colour masses are layered and worked over with calligraphic markings. In 2009 a survey of her paintings, drawings and prints made since 1993 was held at the Australian National University's Drill Hall Gallery.

Text from Stephen Coppel, 'Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas', BMP, 2011.[13]

Exhibitions

Tomescu held her first exhibition in 1979, in Bucharest and has exhibited regularly in Australia and internationally, with over 30 solo exhibitions to date.

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 wrote 'Throughout this performance there is the sense of a guiding intelligence questioning every mark, every gesture. The result is a body of work that seems alive and convincing. There is no particular ‘method’ in these pictures, no concern for light as a subject, but the sensation of light is everywhere.'[17]

Tomescu's graphic works were included in the major survey of prints and drawings Out of Australia at the British Museum, London in 2011.[18]

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 [19]

Other exhibitions include The Triumph of Modernism at TarraWarra Museum of Art.[20] Art Basel Hong Kong (2019, 2018, 2017 & 2015), Permafrost, Fox Jensen Gallery Sydney (2019) 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

“[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 historian Patrick McCaughey Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, 2014


"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."

Art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald John McDonald, August 25, 2012


"For Tomescu the idea of experience is more pertinent to her ways of working than a purely practical idea of ‘process’. ‘Experience is like an accumulation of processes in the making of the work.’ She will often begin with drawing because the immediacy of charcoal or soft pastel allows her a way in. ‘It is a way of generating energy for a new working cycle. It develops associative thinking and allows connections to be made more readily.’ She begins with a multiplicity of materials and over the years has always enjoyed the excitement of trying something new as a series of work opens up. Gradually the sense of fullness moves the work to a great focus and compression of materials, ideas and energies. "

Dr Deborah Hart, senior curator Australian painting and sculpture National Gallery of Australia, ‘States of Becoming’, Retrospective Essay, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2009

Awards and Comissions (include)
  1. Sir John Sulman Prize, 1996
  2. The Wynne Prize 2001[21]
  3. The Dobell Prize for Drawing 2003[22]
  4. Winner of the inaugural LFSA Arts 21 Fellowship at the Heide Museum of Modern Art 1996, Melbourne
  5. Australian Works on Paper Award, Melbourne, 1999
  6. Federal Law Courts of Australia, Melbourne, 1998
  7. Contemporary Art Award, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, Sydney, 1995
  8. Kedumba Drawing Prize, Kedumba Art Society, 1995
  9. Contemporary Art Award, The King’s School, Sydney, 1994
  10. Contemporary Art Award, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, Sydney, 1992
  11. Myer Art Foundation, 1986

Collections

Aida Tomescu work can be found in every Australian state gallery collection, and many regional collections as well as university and corporate collections within Australia and internationally.

These include: The National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australian National University, Canberra, Artbank, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales, New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, Toowoomba Regional Gallery, Queensland, University of New South Wales, Sydney, University of Sydney, New South Wales, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, University of Western Sydney, New South Wales, Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, Curtin University collection Perth, Westpac Collection, New York, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, and The British Museum, London.

Further reading

References
  1. 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), p703-704.
  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.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. Grey, Anna (ed.) 'Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia', 2002, National Gallery of Australia, p. 418
  8. Kolenberg, Hendrik. 'Australian Prints, exhibition catalogue', 1998, Art Gallery of New South Wales
  9. McDonald, John. ‘Wild and Wondrous,’ Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2012
  10. McDonald, John. ‘Pathways to other worlds’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 2007
  11. McDonald, John. ‘Lines of Thought,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September 2011
  12. "Trove". trove.nla.gov.au. Retrieved 18 August 2020.
  13. "Collections Online | British Museum". www.britishmuseum.org. Retrieved 18 August 2020.
  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. http://johnmcdonald.net.au/2009/mccubbin-last-impressions-aida-tomescu/
  17. "McCubbin: Last Impressions & Aida Tomescu". John McDonald. 24 October 2009. Retrieved 18 August 2020.
  18. https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=138446
  19. "Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists". nga.gov.au. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  20. http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/australia-features/9591122/no-lemons-here/
  21. "Wynne Prize finalists 2001 :: Art Gallery NSW". www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  22. "Artist lights up drawing prize". The Sydney Morning Herald. 11 September 2003. Retrieved 16 August 2020.

Aida Tomescu Official Website

Grey to Grey, 1995. Art Gallery of NSW

Negru III, 2001, Art Gallery of NSW

Patru II, 1999, Art Gallery of NSW

Ithaca II, National Gallery of Australia

Works by Aida Tomescu: The Collection, Art Gallery NSW

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