The Art Institute of Chicago, 2018
Purchase from the Art Institute Museum Shop. Available to booksellers from Yale University Press.
With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric.
This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts’s work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings’ philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work.
Edited by James Rondeau and Lekha Hileman Waitoller
With essays by James Rondeau, Kate Nesin, and Juliane Rebentisch
176 pages, 9 3/4 x 13 3/4 in.
74 color ills.
Hardcover $40.00 ($36.00 members)
ISBN: 978-0-300-23387-2
