Nothing Compares To You: Marie Tomanova—Brno
8.6. – 13.7. 2022
Opening Wednesday, June 8 at 6pm
Galerie OFF/FORMAT, Gorkého 41, Brno, Czech Republic
Curated by Thomas Beachdel and Šimon Kříž
Artist Marie Tomanova tells a story about walking through the town square of Mikulov on her way to tell her mother after receiving her acceptance letter to art school in Brno and how it made her feel like she was on her way to realizing her dreams as a young girl of becoming an artist, about her sense of validation, her feeling of success, her excitement about her future. This letter, this acceptance, for her, was a critical moment in her life, the beginning of becoming something, of an opportunity that had always seemed so far away from her life in the small Czech town of Mikulov and her existence on the family farm. It was a mark of becoming, a dangling lure of a youthful dream.
And it was during art school in Brno that she began to use the photograph to document her existence—her life, her daily rhythms, her friends, her environment. It is in Brno where she began to become a photographer with her small cellphone and digital camera as a means of being an artist. The thousands of photographs taken during this time were later conceived as a body of work called Live for The Weather (2017). Enrolled in a painting program at Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, she felt unsupported, objectified and dismissed as a female painter, and discouraged from pursuing painting. In a word, her dreams were being crushed. It is a painful story of disillusion, and loss, frustration, and feeling of failure. It is almost Balzacian, this story of youthful naivete, this almost foiled ambitious attempt to become—it is a story of lost illusions. It is about loss.
After receiving her Masters in painting, but feeling like there was no future for her as a painter in the Czech Republic, or anywhere for that matter, Tomanova was at a loss, cut adrift, aimless—so she moved to America. She didn’t know what to do. While identifying as a failed painter, she rediscovered the photograph, drawing, and personal writing, as a means of reconnecting to her creative self, that part of her that shone like a beacon with that acceptance letter before being systematically drained by her experiences at art school. Moving to New York City around 2012, she found her own mentors in figures such as Francesca Woodman and Ryan McGinley, and began in earnest to build a body of work that channeled her feelings of displacement, her search for identity, and her desire to connect with others.
The result of this period in America, during which at one point she could not leave due to immigration complications, Tomanova ceaselessly photographed and exhibited, creating a series of significant bodies of work that chronicled her experience and existence. At first she photographed herself during her work as an au pair, a peripatetic existence, where connection and value are elusive. During this period, she also began to photograph herself in nature as a means of reconnecting with her past, her life in nature, in Mikulov on the family farm, a place of both self-sufficiency and connection to the land and its cycles of fallow and flower. It was a connection to her youth, her past, her family, and her home that was psychologically necessary as she could not return there.
This sense of being, or seeing, of photographing herself in the American landscape in her self-portrait in nature work (2014-) as a means of establishing her place, her existence—of literally picturing herself in a new environment—was extended into her Young American project where she sought to capture her ideal social landscape, as what she was seeing and feeling in America was not the ideal world she expected during the terrifying conservative, intolerant anti-immigrant Trump years. In Young American (2019), Tomanova creates her own vision of people and place, as Ryan McGinley powerfully writes in his introduction to her 2019 book, “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.”
The connection between natural and social landscape was furthered and made more precise in Tomanova’s New York New York work, in which she steps back to further entwine portraiture and environment, or place. In New York New York, published as a book in 2021 by Hatje Cantz, Tomanova merges the genres of portrait and landscape to effortlessly bounce off one another, revealing a social landscape inextricably linked to place, a portrait of a certain New York City, one that is a picture of her world, a landscape of her life. And the parallel, or distance, between it and the work created in Brno and Mikulov between 2005-2010, Live for the Weather, is compelling. Tomanova has pushed past her failed dreams to dream again, reinvigorating her world, reinvigorating herself.
It is in late 2018 that Tomanova is finally able to return home after being away for over eight long years. She encounters conflicting feelings—she thought she would feel differently than she did, she thought homecoming would be easy, but it wasn’t. She had been away too long—again, she felt displaced. Where was home now? Who is she? This resulted in a body of work taken during this two-week period called It Was Once My Universe (2018/2019), a project chosen for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the 2021 Rencontres d’Arles, the most prestigious photography festival; it will also be released as a book in September 2022. Created in her home, where she grew up, where she began to dream, where she felt like she no longer really belonged, the images span her homecoming, the holidays, her mother’s marriage, and the new year; but her camera timestamp is still set to New York time, indicating the slippage between space and time, the slippage between past and present, the slippage between memory and nostalgia, the slippage between places and selves.
And in a way, a very significant way, while Tomanova has exhibited extensively internationally, to show in Brno may be most significant because it closes a circle that began there over a decade ago with the aspirations and dreams of a young girl who went there to become an artist, but left there so disillusioned. Brno may be one of the most critical, if not the most critical, dot on the map of Tomanova’s constellation. It may be that nothing compares to Brno as the point of reference for the formation of what has become an almost epic attempt at tracing the self and overcoming adversity.
- Thomas Beachdel, PhD
With the financial support of Statutory city of Brno, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Quatro Print and Fotonova.