Marie Tomanova | New York Calling: A Mini Retrospective

‘‘To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.’’ --John Berger

Vernissage: 26th April 2019 19:00 | Young American Book launch during opening

Exhibition duration: 27 April - 17 May 2019

Having graduated with an MFA in painting in the Czech Republic Marie Tomanova moved to the United States in 2011 and began to work through her feelings of displacement living there. By 2014, she rearticulated this idea of displacement into a self-portrait series in which she attempted to see herself in the landscape.

Having grown up on a farm in a small village in south Moravia, she felt that she fit somehow with nature, that it was an essential part of who she is, and that as an immigrant living in the United States, she had grown distant from that physically and emotionally. It is only through this self-portrait work that she started to gain a sense of self-worth as an artist and as a person and began to be able to see herself in the United States and during this time she was also taking the Young American portraits. And in a way, the self-portrait work in nature and the Young American portraits are really very close to the same thing. The self-portrait work is about seeing herself fit in the American landscape and the Young American portraits are also about fitting into the American landscape, but in a social aspect.

As photographer Ryan McGinley writes in his introduction to Tomanova’s debut monograph Young American, “This is a future free of gender binaries and stale old definitions of beauty. In Marie’s world people can just simply be. I wish all of America’s youth culture looked like Marie’s photos of Downtown, diverse and inclusive.”

New York Calling brings together for the first time a wide range of Tomanova’s work including: self-portraiture in nature (2016-ongoing), Young American (2015-ongoing), and Live For the Weather (2005-2010/2017), a series of early images taken while growing up in Mikulov, Czech Republic.

Curated by Thomas Beachdel and Maya Hristova.

The artist will be present at the opening.

EEP Berlin’s Gallery

Liegnitzer Str. 34 | 10999 Berlin [Kreuzberg]

Wed-Sun 2pm - 6pm