The Brooklyn Rail

The opening walls of Tomma Abts’s newest exhibition at David Zwirner are empty, just expanses of gleaming white in front and to the left of our eyes. The three works included in the first gallery hang to our right and behind us—one, Nanko (2025), by itself and the other two, Saske (2024) and Tekes (2022), near each other on the same wall. We could read this as modesty or perhaps as an opportunity for a moment of blankness after leaving the busyness of the street; maybe it’s both. But possibly it is a strategy to inculcate us into the critical looking posture we need to engage with the complexity of Abts’s surfaces. It’s not enough to view them straight-on; we want also to see them awry.

Such anamorphic viewing is helped along by the installation of the paintings at just slightly below head height. As we approach them, peering from above, their angles and parabolas skew and reveal themselves by degree; when we bend slightly to pull ourselves face to face with them, the change of position uncovers new topographies. We can’t be still viewers and attempt to understand these paintings. What seems to be impasto turns out to be flat, lips of highlighter-green in Tekes dissolving under scrutiny to become thinly applied stippled color and its stuttering echo (fans of dropped shadows must be reveling in the one-two punch of Laura Owens and Tomma Abts in Chelsea this spring). But sometimes what’s flat turns out to be depth, as the zig-zagging modeled arcs of Jeldo (2024), when seen from afar, fling our attention out of the canvas and away from the single-hair brush curves that seem simultaneously to build up from and cut into the painting’s center.

Abts keeps us alert with the material decisions she makes. Most of the paintings are acrylic and oil on canvas, as is typical of the artist’s practice, but Tekes throws a curve: its dappled marks are drawn with “water soluble wax crayon,” onto silk the color of the water-filled quarry of Otranto. A sidelong glance at the edges of the picture reveals spots of uneven saturation or maybe the testing of the medium’s solubility; this is a departure from her habit of whiting out the edges of her canvases. That remarkable cyan (or is it hot turquoise?) appears again as the fore/background in Lehno (2025), one of the most beautiful canvases here, all curves and interstices, whether linear or chromatic. Lehno is notable for its size, as well. Of the twelve works in the exhibition, nine are painted on canvases stretched to her habitual dimensions of 18 ⅞ by 15 inches. Three, however, are much larger: Omko (2024), Heerko (2024), and Lehno (2025) each measure 34 by 25 inches; these are the biggest paintings by Abts I’ve ever seen.

What the shift in size does for our understanding of Abts is something I’m still working out. They continue to be all-over painting, and the change does not yet seem to have impacted scale. Abts has repeated the same agitated-pinwheel composition on four different paintings, Tekes (2022), and Neus, Tees, and Heerko (all 2024), with Heerko looming larger. Heerko’s size may have afforded Abts the opportunity to exploit its facets more fully; certainly, it offers plentiful opportunity for dropped shadows and modeling, whereas Neus is painted flatly, with three-dimensionality making an appearance through raised tonal contour lines. Tees is the most monochromatic, painted in shades of gray that range from dull to khaki. Here, though, the paint looks like it has been applied with sponges; from a distance, it reads as aging Sculp-metal.

Compositional repetition is something Abts has toyed with throughout her career: Nanko, for example, seems to share a radial pulse with Swidde and Dako, both made in 2016 and not displayed at Zwirner. These three are all the same, customary size, but whereas Abts has deployed acrylic and oil on canvas for Nanko, the two earlier works are patinated bronze and aluminum, respectively. They must have been cast from a different, even earlier, painted work, the artist switching from painting to sculpture to sculptural painting as she revisits her strategies.

Cast metals make their appearances in this exhibition in two two-part paintings, bronze in Saske (2024) and aluminum in Edje (2024). Edje’s lower left corner has been replaced by a cast-aluminum triangle, which retains the canvas’s folded-over corner and bears a mottled surface akin to Tees’s paint handling. The aluminum, however, is also polished just enough to possess a sheen. Its hypotenuse abuts the image of a triangle, painted in yellow and gray fuzzy stripes to read as a 1980s-desktop-aesthetic “shiny.” Further versions of painted “shiny” reappear in two additional misty gray-and-yellow triangles delineated by sharp edges at the painting’s top right. But just when you’re ready to discount the whole as too unbearably kitschy and turn away, the reflectivity of the aluminum catches your eye. As you concentrate on that, and therefore remove focus from the other triangles, the yellow and gray patterns activate, blearing together to cohere into painted equivalents of metallic luster. It’s exactly what Leon Battista Alberti hoped for when he called for artists to paint with colors instead of depending on gold leaf. A miraculous effect that only painting can achieve—in the words of Slavoj Žižek: “a pure semblance that we can perceive clearly only by ‘looking awry.’”