Liliane Tomasko: an artistic pick
Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!
Back after quite a while with another artist for you to check out! Today I want to dive into the work of artist Liliane Tomasko!
A little bit about her: She was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1967 and studied fine art in London, earning a BA from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 1995 and an MA from Royal Academy of Arts in 1998. What makes her particularly interesting is that her work has evolved quitre dramatically over the years that she has been an active artist.
In her early work, she mostly painted domestic interiors and objects, especially unmade beds, sheets, clothing and curtains. Of course these weren't really about depicting a bedroom in the literal sense; she used them mostly to explore intimacy, memory, absence and the unconscious.
Later her work changed and these recognizable forms of objects started to gradually dissolve into large, atmospheric abstract paintings, using sweeping marks, intense colour, shadow and layered surfaces. Her sublject became more explicit the psyche, freams and altered states of consciousness. For her, sleep and dreaming was described as a passage into an inner world and this idea has remained central to her practice. Interestingly, she has even connected her work to the ancient Greek practice of incubation, where people would sleep in sacred places seeking dreams or healing.
I find quite interesting the way she's explaining the dream and the consciousness herself, so I'd also like to add here her own statement regarding her work:
A dream of:
Into sleep we descend night after night - our bodies at rest as a part of us travels into the darkness of the altered state of consciousness that is sleep. Above, in the waking reality we play out our lives, acting out our respective stories in a physical universe we are apt at manipulating but nonetheless have very limited knowledge of.
In my body of work I have always explored, in one way or another, the domestic sphere, our immediate surroundings and in particular the bed, where we spend a large part of our lives. If our home is the interior to which we return everyday for respite from the outside world, sleeping and the dream realm are where we go to even deeper levels of ourselves. It is a kind of journey to our most intimate space, a descent into the storehouse of our memories, our hopes, fears and desires, and the accumulation of our ideas and beliefs.
In dreams, elements of reality come together to make constellations that would otherwise be unimaginable. We create new connections between things, space and time. There is a sense of experimental freedom, dominated by the surreal and paradoxical, a relief from the logic and reason that shape the waking hours.
This sense of impossible simultaneities finds its way onto my canvases, through a process of transformations that starts with a photograph of an unmade bed and ends up as an abstract painting.
Like the protagonist Toru Okada in Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’, who repeatedly descends into the darkness of a well to find clues to the mysterious events that are happening in his life, the paintings in ‘a dream of:’ make use of the disjointed quality so typical to our nocturnal journeys, to evoke the powerful and strange feeling a visceral dream can leave behind and linger as a presence, or a present, from the underbelly of life. It is the connection that we make when dreams enter the waking consciousness that I am interested in. Like a bridge or a tunnel it allows traffic and communication between ‘above’ and ‘below’.
There was a practice in ancient Greece called Incubation, whereby people who needed spiritual guidance or healing, would spend an extended period of time in a dark cave, or a light deprived chamber inside a temple. There they would lie without the stimulus of daylight on their retinas to make images and produce the colors which shape the world as we see it during our waking hours.
Sleep to most is no more than a necessity. However, maybe during those hours spent in this almost unconscious state, something is illuminated that cannot be seen in the brightness of the day.
Her work is held in collections including the Albertina, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Kunstmuseum Bern, Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, IVAM in Valencia, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
What I find most fascinating about Liliane Tomasko’s work is the way something so ordinary can become so unfamiliar. Her paintings made me think about how much of our inner world exists beyond what we can actually put into words. The tangled forms, shifting colours and almost dreamlike compositions feel like glimpses of thoughts or memories that are difficult to hold onto. You don’t necessarily have to figure out exactly what you are looking at—and perhaps that is the point. For me, Tomasko’s work is an invitation to simply stay with that feeling of uncertainty and let the painting become whatever it reminds you of.
Well, that's it for today's post and I hope you found it as intriguing as I did when I was researching about Tomasko. Let me know your thoughts on the comments too and until next time!
As always thank you for reading and see you in the next post!
xoxoxo
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