Aida Tomescu Sold at Auction Prices

Painter

Aida Tomescu (born October 1955) is an Australian contemporary artist who is known for her abstract paintings, collages, drawings and prints. Tomescu is a winner of the Dobell Prize for Drawing, the Wynne Prize for Landscape and the Sir John Sulman Prize, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Early life and education: Tomescu was born in October 1955 in Bucharest, Romania where she lived until age 23. She arrived in Australia one year later, in May 1980. She studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in the late 1970s. In 1977 she graduated with a diploma in painting and two years later she had her first solo exhibition. In 1983 she completed a post-graduate diploma in visual arts at the City Art Institute in Sydney.

"The seed of her career as a painter became planted in Aida Tomescu while studying at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in the late 1970s, when she closely studied the work of Cezanne and his legacy through cubism. She read Kandinsky's famous essay, 'Concerning the spiritual in art' ... When she emigrated to Australia from Romania and took up study at the City Art Institute in Sydney in 1980 she was ripe for a dedication to abstract painting from which she never wavered."[6]:216

Career: After her initial traditional studio- and theory-based training in Bucharest, Tomescu's work gradually evolved towards abstraction. She was affected by the bright Australian light, which eventually worked its way into her work. Tomescu said: "One of the first things that happened here is that I bought bigger canvases, I increased the scale. Though I was continuing as a painter, I needed a whole new vocabulary, and this would only develop gradually."[7] Her work has been informed by Paul Cezanne and cubism, Willem de Kooning[8] and the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky expressed in his 1910 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. When she emigrated to Australia from Romania she studied at the City Art Institute in Sydney in 1980, and has not diverted from her interest in abstract painting.[8]

In 1986 Tomescu was invited to the Victorian Print Workshop, now the Australian Print Workshop. As an artist who regarded drawing as an important part of her practice, she found the experience of working with etching plates liberating as she had to "curb any craving for precision and for controlling an image". At the same time, Tomescu "loved its transformative powers over my drawing, the way in which it liberated my drawing in the acid tray. Materiality was removed entirely by the acid, so I was left with an image that is really vulnerable, open."