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ART STUFF on a train # 38: ‘That’s New!’

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Tomma Abts: Hepe, 2011

There’s always pressure on artists to move on, but meaningful change can be quite subtle. Tate Britain’s quietly interesting ‘Painting Now’ (to 9 Feb) selects five contemporary artists not likely to shift sensationally. The highlight is seven mostly recent works by the 2006 Turner prize winner Tomma Abts. As ever, they take their titles from German names and are scaled like life-sized portrait heads, so we seem to meet the paintings as personalities. Their patient, additive, multi-year processes can be traced. They achieve an all-over absence of emphasis through the precise use of formal devices which Mark Godfrey’s accompanying text categorises as lines and areas interrupting each other; toning down colours to prevent dominance; and introducing competing types of illusion, such as fake shadows. Small wonder, perhaps, that I overheard the view ‘she hasn’t developed’. Is that right, though? Most shifts, such as towards the increased optical shimmer of Zebe (2010), are bound to seem slow and organic, given for example that Jeels (2010) was in her studio for a decade, and so may actually be older than Theiel (1994). Yet this selection includes two rather sharp departures from Abts’ norm: Hepe (2011) is divided into two pieces so that the gap effects a particularly radical means of interruption; and Jesz (2013) isn’t a painting at all, but a bronze cast from a painting (destroyed in the process), which Abts felt she couldn’t otherwise resolve. The green patina hauntingly picks up the painting’s relief patterns. So I thought: ‘Wow, that’s new!’

Jesz Abts

Tomma Abts: Jesz, 2013

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

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