Tomma Abts

Tomma Abts was born on 26 December 1967 in Kiel, then part of West Germany. She studied at the Hochschule der Kunste Berlin (the Berlin University of the Arts) from 1989 to 1995, where German-language sources describe her as a Meisterschulerin in Heinz Emigholz's film class. In 1995 she moved to London on a DAAD scholarship and has lived and worked there ever since.

Abts is known for small abstract paintings, in oil and acrylic on canvas, that are consistently sized 48 by 38 centimeters. She works without preliminary sketches, building each composition intuitively and in layers over an extended period, and titles her paintings with invented German first names drawn from a naming dictionary rather than any personal or narrative reference. In 2004 she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts, and in 2006 she won the Turner Prize, becoming the first woman painter to receive the award.

Critical attention to Abts's work centers on the tension between an intuitive, unplanned process and the exacting, almost architectural precision of the finished paintings. In materials published alongside her 2018 to 2019 Serpentine Galleries exhibition, the artist has described her process as open-ended at the outset but always directed toward a precise, final image, distinguishing her approach from pure process painting. That account of deliberate, non-narrative construction runs through the critical response to her Turner Prize win, her 2008 New Museum survey, and the Serpentine and Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, all of which frame her small-scale abstractions as sustained investigations of composition rather than gestural expression.

Abts's recorded auction high is Tiard, which sold for GBP 212,500 (roughly USD 278,700) at Sotheby's London on 6 October 2018. That result superseded an earlier notable price of GBP 118,750 for Zaarke, sold in 2017 as part of the Mario Testino collection, at the time reported as the first Abts oil painting to reach auction. She is represented by David Zwirner, alongside long-standing relationships with Galerie Buchholz and greengrassi, and her auction appearances remain infrequent relative to her institutional standing.

Abts has no published catalogue raisonne, so verification runs through her three representing galleries rather than an independent scholarly registry. Her market is thin by volume: results at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips are infrequent, and the consistent 48 by 38 centimeter format makes individual works easy to compare but does not offset the small sample size. Collectors should treat any single auction result, including the 2018 Tiard record, as a data point drawn from a narrow pool rather than a stable trend line.