Aida Tomescu

Grigia II, 1997
oil on canvas
183.0 x 153.0 cm
signed and dated ‘Aida Tomescu ‘97’ (on the reverse)

SOLD

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Provenance
Coventry Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney


Grigia II (1997) comes from a period of transition in Aida Tomescu’s work away from what Terence Maloon has described as “the churned-up, grungy textures, the lashings of dribbles and the peripheral fizz of spatters” that characterised Tomescu’s works in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, Tomescu was beginning to work with “clear and radiant” colours, and by 2002 was creating paintings that reminded Maloon of the Aegean Sea, “serene and beatific.” [1]

Tomescu continued to work across both modes of work for several years, but the Grigia paintings are some of the earlier examples of the latter body of work.The year that Grigia II was made, Tomescu travelled to Europe as the winner of the inaugural Lowenstein Sharp Feiglin Ades Arts 21 Fellowship in 1996, leading to a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Heide, later in 1997.

There are two related works by Tomescu with the same root title. The first, Grigia (1997) is in the permanent collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, gifted to the institution at the time of her solo exhibition the same year. The second related work, Grigia I, was a finalist in the 1998 Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Writing on Tomescu’s work for the artist’s solo exhibition at Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, in 2009, Deborah Hart described “the sheer physicality of paint, its density and the archaeology of the layers, its application and movement across the surface.” [2]

Terence Maloon similarly describes (albeit for a later, 2007 body of work) a meticulous, months-long process of layering paint to achieve her unique surfaces and visual illusions that remains relevant for her earlier works in the 1990s: “Tomescu dedicates her art to similar ideals of integrity and irreducibility. Whenever gaps in the impasto and glimpses of the bare ground occur in her paintings, these are integral parts of the pictorial structure; in effect, Tomescu’s images are hole-proof too. The image, the orientation of the brushmarks, the configuration of colour, the surface and the substance of the painting seem to be one and the same thing, yet to create an illusion of this kind might entail the work of weeks and months, requiring extraordinary resources of ingenuity and critical acumen to achieve their synthesis.” [3]

[1] Terence Maloon, Aida Tomescu, Niagara Galleries, catalogue essay, 4 April 2006, unpaginated.
[2] Deborah Hart, ‘Aida Tomescu: States of Becoming,’ in Aida Tomescu: Paintings and Drawings, Australian National University, Canberra, exh. cat., p. 15.
[3] Terence Maloon, ‘Aida Tomescu: Campi Flegrei,’ Liverpool Street Gallery, 18 August 2007, catalogue essay, unpaginated.