Aida Tomescu, now 70, stands as one of Australia's most revered abstract painters, yet she remains largely unknown to the general public despite her remarkable success. Her paintings hang in major collections across the country, her works sell for $100,000 to $300,000 each, and she has built a career spanning over four decades in Sydney. This November marks a significant milestone as she celebrates both her 70th birthday and 45 years since arriving in Australia from Communist Romania.
Tomescu's journey began in 1979 when she left Romania at age 23, spending a year in Greece where she taught herself English through dictionaries and novels before arriving in Sydney. A fellow Romanian living in Liverpool sponsored her immigration, giving her the chance to build a new life in what she calls "free, sunny Sydney." Her eloquent speaking style, peppered with references to Chopin, Messiaen, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Cézanne, and Titian, reflects her deep cultural knowledge and artistic sophistication.
"It's because I did not speak for 23 years in that country," Tomescu explains when asked about her loquaciousness, referring to her silence under Communist rule. This articulate nature once led podcast host Maria Stoljar to arrive for a planned one-hour interview in 2017, only to find herself still there eight hours later, captivated by Tomescu's insights about art and life.
Her upcoming exhibition at Fox Jensen Gallery in Alexandria represents her first Sydney show in three years and opens next Friday. The exhibition features more than a dozen paintings, including three towering triptychs, at least two diptychs of similar scale, and five smaller works. It marks only the second solo show since the gallery reopened in expanded premises and the first in the new space for an Australian artist at a gallery largely dedicated to international artists.
Andrew Jensen, the gallery's co-owner, emphasizes what makes Tomescu's work special: "Her work transcends the vitiating forces of fashion and dispenses with the current allure for political science 101 that grips so much of what is made today." He argues that great painting, like music and poetry, leaves political maneuvering to others, while Tomescu leverages "a deep knowledge and consequential feeling for poetry, literature and music – and art."
With more than 40 solo exhibitions to her name, Tomescu's work appears in most major public and many private collections nationwide. She has also shown internationally through Flowers Gallery, which took her work to New York's Armory print fair in March and has exhibited her pieces in London and Hong Kong. Despite this impressive record, she has yet to receive a solo show from a top state or national institution.
Tomescu describes herself as "a Romanian-born artist who turned into an Australian painter." Her success seems particularly remarkable given the challenges facing older artists in a culture constantly seeking novelty, and the relative rarity of solo public shows for living Australian artists, especially abstract painters who remain less popular than figurative artists in Australia.
Entering Tomescu's Rosebery studio overwhelms the senses with the glorious smell of wet paint and massive canvases covered in thick red and white paint, with touches of yellow and other shades. The works feature drips, splotches, accidents, and areas with minimal paint, each piece both similar to and different from the others. She purchased this studio in 2018 partly for its four-meter-high ceilings, though she initially found herself painting smaller works on the floor among moving boxes before eventually ordering larger canvases.
Her artistic practice defies easy assumptions. While her works might suggest velocity, she builds them painstakingly over many years through a process involving painting, scraping off, and painting more. She works on several pieces simultaneously, constantly seeking connections between them. "The paintings tell her when they're finished," and though they may appear emotionally driven, she maintains that such a state would compromise the clarity essential to her work.
"People relate to red as a color of anger or passion, they see many things in red but it will never be that for me," she explains. "It's similar to music. Music is not about emotions but it amplifies the emotion in us." Regarding her sources – Messiaen was one for this current show – she believes "the whole point of art is to travel the distance away from the artist, from their private life, to become something of its own, with its own, new identity."
Tomescu's rigorous artistic foundation traces back to her education in Romania. She started art school at age 10 alongside regular school and earned her diploma from Bucharest's Institute of Fine Arts in 1977, where she learned to paint using plaster casts and life models. "I will be forever grateful for the Romanian education system of that time, for being so rigorous and disciplined," she says. "It's still the foundation of my work."
After arriving in Australia, she completed a postgraduate diploma while working for the Department of Immigration and later taught at the National Art School. She painted and exhibited simultaneously, managing to save enough after six years to buy her first apartment – not from financial concerns, but knowing that unlike in Europe, renting in Australia could leave her vulnerable to eviction, disrupting her studio time.
Successful exhibitions at Coventry Gallery in Paddington during the late 1980s elevated her status, though surprisingly, this success left her depressed. "Everything changed around me. People thought I would change, but I didn't," she recalls. She began questioning what motivated people to buy her work, concluding that "success is better for the family and friends of artists than for the artists themselves."
Despite this philosophical conflict with success, financial stability has allowed her to live off her art for more than two decades. She's known for being demanding with dealers – some might say that's an understatement – leading to occasional falling-outs about which she remains resolute. "Relationships end when they dispense with dialogue, when a gallery excludes the artist's views, when they no longer share the same values," she explains. "The problem for most artists is not that they are too difficult, it's that they are too trusting."
Tomescu's personal life centers entirely around her art. Her mother Ecaterina arrived for a six-month visit in 1987 and never left, living with Tomescu until her death in 2010 just shy of her 83rd birthday. "She created all the circumstances for me to be a painter without knowing it," Tomescu reflects. When her mother died of a heart attack, Tomescu struggled with the finality: "My days and travels stayed exactly the same, except for the heartbreaking reality that she was no longer there."
While she has had relationships over the years, Tomescu says she never wanted to marry any of the men involved. Though she's "fondly observant of children," she would not want to care for one full-time. Her focus remains singular: "I go from show to show, cycle of painting to cycle of painting. I don't think much of the future, nor of the past."
Reflecting on her background, Tomescu finds her Romanian upbringing useful for an artist: "It wasn't a place of high expectations, and that's good for a painter. You don't work for the exhibition, you don't work for the success, you certainly don't work for the financial rewards. You work for the painting, and the only expectations you have are for the work."
The exhibition "Messiaen" runs from November 15 to December 20 at Fox Jensen Gallery in Alexandria, representing another chapter in the remarkable career of an artist who remains one of Australia's best-kept secrets in the contemporary art world.
