Aida Tomescu is known for her highly expressive prints and drawings and richly textured and coloured paintings. Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1980 Tomescu migrated to Australia leaving behind the totalitarian communist regime in Romania. Since then, she has developed a sophisticated language of painterly abstraction, her works appearing in a constant state of flux and transition and invoking open-ended inquiry.

Tomescu often begins a new series by working on paper with ink and pastels, stoking associative thinking processes to draw out the endless possibilities of mark-making. In Romania Tomescu had studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest where for many years, students were tasked with drawing from plaster casts. A highly repetitive process, Tomescu reflects on its importance at the beginning of her career:

In 1986 Tomescu was invited to work at the Victorian Print Workshop, Melbourne, founded by master printer John Loane, for three weeks. Loane was an early supporter of Tomescu’s and encouraged her to try printmaking. During the 1990s, Tomescu worked closely with Loane to produce several series of etching and aquatints, culminating in the Seria Neagra series of 1998-99. The four works of this series are amongst Tomescu’s largest and most dramatic prints. Her gestural mark-making conveys movement and compressed energy while the deep blackness of the ink creates a stark contrast with the paper support. The material and philosophical suggestions of transition embodied within these works is extended in their title, Seria neagra which translated from Romanian, reads as ‘Black series’. She has said:

Tomescu completed a Diploma of Art (Painting) in 1977 at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In 1983 she completed a Postgraduate Diploma of Art, City Art Institute, Sydney (later known as UNSW Art & Design). Tomescu has exhibited extensively and her works included in major survey shows including Abstraction: Celebrating Australian women abstract artists, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2017) and The Story of Australian Printmaking 1801 – 2005, National Gallery of Australia (2007). Her works have been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, Korea, New Zealand, Romania and the United Kingdom. In 1996 Tomescu was the recipient of the inaugural LFSA Arts 21 Fellowship at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. She has won the Sulman Prize (1996), the Wynne Prize (2001), and the Dobell Prize for Drawing (2003) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Tomescu’s work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and state and regional collections throughout Australia, as well as international collections including the British Museum, United Kingdom, The Chartwell Collection, New Zealand, and the National Museum, Bucharest, Romania. The UNSW Art Collection holds three paintings and fourteen prints by Tomescu.

FEATURED WORKS FROM THE UNSW ART COLLECTION

RESOURCES

Aida Tomescu | artist website

Aida Tomescu | interview with John Mcdonald