Tomma Abts

Audio Guide Transcripts

The Turner Prize 2006 audio guide is available from the ticket office outside the exhibition.
Listen to three clips from the audio guide below.

Audio guide transcripts: Louisa Buck on Tomma Abts Martin McGeown on Tomma Abts Andrew Renton on Tomma Abts

You must have version 8 or higher of the Flash Player installed on your computer in order to view the mp3 player, select and playback tracks. To download the latest version of Flash see here.

Louisa Buck on Tomma Abts

(LOUISA BUCK) What we’re looking at here is a room full of paintings, but this really is an installation of works.

NARRATOR: That’s not the artist. Tomma Abts asked art critic Louisa Buck to speak for her. Move down into the installation as you listen to the commentary.

(LOUISA BUCK) She’s selected these paintings very carefully for the sum as well as the parts, the conversations that they have, the correspondences they’ve got, the ways in which they contrast, but also have a link and a running theme going through them, both formally and in terms of colour.

If we zero in on one particular painting, Mino, which has been painted this year; it’s a pale brown painting with, with zigzag kind of stick like forms almost round the edge. If we look at that, it gives a clue as to how she actually works, because she doesn’t make drawings, she doesn’t have a preconceived plan, she certainly doesn’t use a computer. She’ll start from the barest of a minimum. She might just divide the canvas in a few ways and then she starts painting, and it really is an intuitive journey. And they’re not quite what they seem because if you look at Mino, you can see that actually the predominantly thickly painted pale brown background is actually the last thing she’s painted. That’s the final layer. The bits that look like detail, the little strips of colour, actually are the first thing that she painted, that she’s left existing and painted round and round and round, so it’s inside out. Spatial tricks are being played, openings are given. The more you look at it, the more complicated it is. So this painting actually carries its own history. And all her paintings are like that: they’re actually about themselves, they’re about the way they’ve been painted. They’re not of anything, but they’re of themselves.

Back to Tomma Abts artist page

Martin McGeown on Tomma Abts

NARRATOR: Tomma Abts asked her friend Martin McGeown—who runs the Cabinet Gallery in London—to be her “champion”. We asked him to talk about his experience in looking at these works:

(MARTIN MCGEOWN) I think it’s interesting with Tomma’s work that, in some ways, the experience of looking at the work comes very close to what I feel is experienced by the artist when in the process of making the paintings themselves. All sorts of associations in the mind of the viewer are generated, sometimes by the forms which, whilst abstract, are at the same time descriptive and have a sort of actuality to them that instantly and unavoidably remind you of things or feelings, associations.

Now, I think that Tomma passes through this process and there’s a way in which she has a kind of process of checks and balances in order to both keep the painting open, but also to bring it to a form of a concrete definition so that you feel, paradoxically, that this painting was always going to look this way. But it does go through huge amounts of changes and revisions. And I think this is what happens when you look at the work yourself. In this sense-- and this is what interests me about the work--she brings the experience of looking and the experience of making into a kind of equivalence; in the sense there seems to be some kind of resolution between production and reception of the work.

NARRATOR: And we asked him: what does he think about the consistently small size of these paintings?

(MARTIN MCGEOWN) There is something about the scale of the work which demands an actual physical proximity on the part of the viewer. Also, the fact that this scale is maintained constantly seems to suggest there is something extremely necessary about this scale. What that is exactly, I think, remains just out of reach, but I think the scale also results in what I might call their ‘staying power’, in that you are held and somehow your space is prolonged by their presence.

Back to Tomma Abts artist page

Andrew Renton on Tomma Abts

(ANDREW RENTON) I think the jury was very excited about Tomma’s work because we believed that she has extended the language of painting. You know it’s an age-old conundrum, is painting dead, what else can you do, how do you articulate yourself within the realm of a painting on a canvas.

But the real achievement about these paintings is the depth of them, that the gesture or the painterly stroke on the canvas is given a kind of depth and, literally, you see, you see shadows forming on the canvas surface. These paintings evolve over time, and it is a narrative of the process of painting, over-painting and re-painting. And if you come closer to the paintings you see that.

We nominated Tomma this year because we recognised that this was an artist who had been working so consistently, so rigorously over the past decade, that there was now a body of work that was unlike anybody else’s, and we really wanted to recognise that discipline and that rigor.

You know, we live in an art world where many, many works are very loud, very vulgar, they scream at you, ‘come and look at me’. And, here is a body of work that has consistently operated on this small scale, on a very, very focused level, forcing the viewer to come right close up to the work.

Back to Tomma Abts artist page