The Colour of Being

Toma Stenko, Awakening, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 190 x 160cm

Toma Stenko unbelievably loves colour. After all, colour flows through everything. We see in colour, feel in colour, and even speak in colour (ever “feel blue” or “see red”?). Colour is the essence of being, and for Toma colour is the essence of love.

Love is the prism through which she sees the world, seeing the best in everyone and everything.

Toma Stenko Resonance, 2024, mosaic comprised of 15 pieces, acrylic on canvas, about 200 x 100cm

Her powerful, often large-scale paintings are a vortex of colour from which whole universes seem to be born, shaped, and reshaped. This exploration she says is a striving to see the visible in the invisible, the infinite in the finite. Her art is vibrant, dynamic, often joyous, and always alive.

For me, painting is a wild river which carries you and you don’t know where you will wind up. It is this unknown that gives birth to the magic of creativity! You dissolve, discarding all your thoughts, knowledge, experience, and start everything from a blank canvas where every sound, colour, and rustle moves into being a new form, character, space. I am obsessed with colour, its melody, scent, mood, depth…

- Toma Stenko, 2024

Toma Stenko, In the Beginning, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 136cm

Hands are a recurring theme in Toma Stenko's practice. To her the hand embodies unconditional love and safety, evoking the magic of childhood. Her earlier works often feature a large hand - comforting, supporting, protective.

Toma Stenko, Love of the Big Hand, 2018, pastel on paper, 111 x 83cm

Her most recent works reintroduce the hands as a superimposed collage element - a photograph reproduced as a digital print onto the acrylic-on-canvas background. The hands become the story of the sitter whose face is out of view and whose essence is captured in the field of dancing, vibrant colours in the background.

It is amazing how personal a story these “hand portraits” tell. Toma gifted to me such a portrait with my hands (not shown here) and I felt strangely naked before the world seeing it in the gallery.

Toma Stenko, Sultana, 2024, acrlylic on canvas and digital print, 66 x 80cm

Don’t miss our current exhibition with us: TOMA AND IK STENKO: ESSENCE On view through 11 May, Mon-Sat 11am-6pm, 16 Victoria Grove, London, W8 5RW

Following Toma’s inaugural solo with us in 2020 and a critically acclaimed joint presentation with her son as part of the Venice Biennale 2022, the mother-and-son duo return to London for their first joint UK exhibition. The exhibition includes works created in the last couple of years between studios in Georgia, Russia, London and Dubai. More on Ik Stenko in next week’s blog. More here.