Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to present Portrait of the Self, Liliane Tomasko’s first exhibition with the gallery. Spanning Galleries 1 & 2 in West Hollywood, the exhibition will feature a recent suite of lyrical, large-scale paintings and works on paper exploring the internal realities of selfhood—how glimmers of the self, always in flux, can be accessed through color and form. Portrait of the Self will run from June 3 to August 12, 2023.

Portrait of the Self cultivates a sense of intimacy and corporeality absent of its figural representation. Throughout the exhibition, Tomasko distills her paintings to a focused meditation on color, shape, and texture. The resulting works are engrossing, multicolored arrangements of sweeping, curvilinear brushstrokes and other irregular forms. Each gesture is applied with varying degrees of opacity, creating a palimpsest-like effect, wherein the initial stages of the painting are visible between later-stage brushstrokes. Negative space creates the illusion of pictorial space and depth, which is furthered by changing tonalities and light.

Each work harnesses the expressive power of the fundamental qualities of painting, thereby using abstraction to conjure distinct emotional and psychological states. Given the works are framed as “portraits of the self,” Tomasko asks viewers to consider what notion of the self these compositions depict. For Tomasko, the self is inchoate and capricious; its portraits, therefore, do not refer to representational images of a person, but rather articulate a panoply of subconscious moments moving between memory and feeling.

In Portrait of the Self, Tomasko presents viewers with many of what the artist has called “registers of visceral subjectivity,” marking a new phase in Tomasko’s explorations of the more intangible features of experience and identity. Past work centered on evocations of the textures, fabrics, and atmospheres of domestic interiors. Based upon close-up polaroids taken by the artist of clothes belonging to absent others, used mattresses, slept-in bedsheets, and light-filtering curtains, her paintings brought inspired attention to the traces and impressions of life visible in the materials left in one’s wake. In Portrait of the Self, Tomasko presents the latest installment in her more recent investigation of immaterial reality: dreams, reveries, and their shaping of inner life.