Design and Art Australia Online

Aida Tomescu was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1955. Tomescu studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, Bucharest. After completing her studies she began exhibiting in group exhibitions at the public gallery spaces in Bucharest. Tomescu held her first solo exhibition in 1979 at Cenaclu Gallery, Bucharest, before moving to Sydney, Australia, in 1980. In 1983 Tomescu completed a postgraduate degree at the City Art Institute, Sydney.

She began exhibiting with Gallery A in 1981, following which she has held regular solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney at galleries including: Coventry Gallery, Deutscher Brunswick Street, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Martin Browne Fine Art, Niagara Galleries and Liverpool Street Gallery. In 1996 Tomescu was the inaugural winner of the LSFA Arts 21 Fellowship and in 1997 she held a solo exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria. Tomescu has won a number of arts prizes including the Sir John Sulman Prize in 1996, the Wynne Prize in 2001 and the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2003.

Tomescu’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions in public museums in Australia, including: 'Abstraction’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1990), 'Articulate Surfaces’ at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (1994), 'Review’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1995), 'Look Again’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1998), 'Uncommon Worlds: Aspects of Contemporary Australian Art’ at the National Gallery of Australia (2000), 'Asia in Australia: Beyond Orientalism’, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Queensland (2001), 'Depth of Field’, Shepparton Art Gallery and Monash University Museum of Art (2003), 'Place Made’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2004), 'Sixth Drawing Biennale’, The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (2006), 'Masters of Emotion’, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria (2007), 'Time and Place’ at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria (2007) and 'New’ at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.

As Terence Maloon writes in a 2006 exhibition catalogue: “Her paintings are almost always the result of repeated painting-over, scraping out and eliminating whatever is unwanted and unnecessary. The right of every ingredient to survive and prevail is relentlessly questioned and tested. For Tomescu, as for Matisse, painting out and scraping off involve the workings of a ferocious critical intelligence. The image that survives is an outcome of repeated demolitions and countless modifications. However, if all goes well, the painting benefits tremendously from all this investment of psychic energy.”

Tomescu’s work is represented in numerous public collections, including: The National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art, The British Museum, London, The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, and Artbank, Sydney. Tomescu’s work has been acquired by corporate collections, including: The Macquarie Group Collection, Allens Arthur Robinson and IBM Australia as well as important private collections, including: The Laverty Collection and The Holmes a Court Collection. Her paintings and drawings are also represented in regional gallery and university collections throughout Australia.

Aida Tomescu lives and works in Sydney.

Writers:

Liverpool Street Gallery

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011