DUBLIN.- In Twofold, Liliane Tomasko’s distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour unfold across five new diptychs on aluminium and linen. Opening up spatial possibility, this format allows tone, form and texture to dialogue back and forth across surfaces, sparking new resonances and shaping our understanding of each panel in relation to its neighbour. These paintings must negotiate two distinct voices – sometimes finding harmony, elsewhere tension; forging complex relationships that actively engage the viewer. “To confront these monumental diptychs of Tomasko is to enter a garden of forking paths, a forest of signs,” writes critic Raphy Sarkissian in a newly commissioned text. “Diaphanous and opaque forms coexist within these enigmatic diptychs.”

Like much of Tomasko’s oeuvre, the works in Twofold appear abstract but bear deep and tangled connections to the pictorial and narrative worlds. Larger shapes, suggestive of figures, come in and out of focus, fragmenting and coming back together in the mind’s eye. The work is also shaped by the artist’s longstanding interest in mythologies, particularly narratives of equilibrium and justice, such as the ancient concept of the weighing of the soul. Tomasko’s enquiry into form, colour and shape, and the profound emotional resonances they can imbue, is continued in a new series of works on paper. Each one offers a discordant web of colour and line; a denser counterpoint to the expansive duality of the diptychs. Together, the works in Twofold offer a luminous excavation of the human psyche.

‘From Surrealist automatism to the investigation of the unconscious to the depiction of dreamlike sceneries to Abstract Expressionism’s investigations through energetic brushstrokes: such movements and practices of twentieth-century art and culture have become richly incorporated within Tomasko’s most recent paintings. Registering before our eyes as a ceaseless formation and a never-ending dissolution, a given diptych by Tomasko taps into our somatic selves and our psyche, entities that are in states of constant flux.’ --Raphy Sarkissian, 2024

LILIANE TOMASKO
b. 1967 Zurich, Switzerland. Lives and works in London

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour. The artist begins her investigation of the human psyche in the domestic sphere, offering attentive studies of bedding and clothing, the intimate textures of our lives. Through the artist’s reflections, these prosaic materials open a gateway into the nocturnal realm of sleep and dreaming, articulating the creatively fertile space between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Tomasko’s approach to abstraction is rooted, therefore, in the physical realm but ultimately transcends beyond it. Fusing material observation with intuition and association, the artist produces vigorous, imaginative expressions of familiar environments and psychological states. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadow, and painterly gesture allow space to come in and out of focus, oscillating between clarity and obscurity and emulating the atmospheric power of dreams and memories.

Liliane Tomasko lives and works in London.

Tomasko’s recent solo exhibitions include The Artist’s Eye, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Name me not, CAB Burgos, Spain (both 2023); S P E L L O F T H E W O O D, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Evening Wind, Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York, USA (both 2022); Morpheus, Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, Germany (2021); dark goes lightly, Château la Coste, France (2019); Caja de sueños, Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; 12 nights x dreams, ROCA Rockland Center for the Arts, New York, USA (both 2018). Recent group exhibitions include Risky Business, Torrance Art Museum, LA (2024); Austria–Germany Painting 1970 to 2020, Albertina Modern, Vienna (2023); Andy Warhol to Cecily Brown: from the collections of The Albertina, The Albertina (2022); Inventing Nature, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; From the Real: Liliane Tomasko & Sean Scully, Newlands House Gallery, Petworth House (both 2021) and Abstract Painting Now!, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2017).