Clouds and Plums
Marie Tomanová
PRESS RELEASE
Curator: Thomas Beachdel
FOG Gallery presents Marie Tomanová’s first solo exhibition in Slovakia, Clouds and Plums. The exhibition introduces a new body of work by Tomanová, Song of Exile, that can be seen in the outdoor install. It also brings together several of Tomanová’s established bodies of work done in New York City and in the Czech Republic – First Roll: Kate and Odie (2025); New York New York (2021); It Was Once My Universe (2019).Clouds and Plums, then, is about the reconciliation of disparity – really a bringing together. While displacement, distance and time have been major themes in Tomanová’s work – and still remain to be – Clouds and Plums is an opportunity to erase those aspects to focus more directly on the photograph itself; the power of the image to evoke an internal landscape – plums ripe with feeling; clouds soft and vaporous.
Photographs exhibited from New York New York and It Was Once My Universe bounce between portraits of youth taken in New York City and photographs of Tomanová’s childhood home in Mikulov – the photographs are from when she was first able to return home in eight years and reveal a sense of wonder in the mundane joined to a sense of unfamiliarity in the familiar of home and family. The date stamp is still set to New York City time, even though she is in Czech Republic. Two photographs from First Roll: Kate and Odie provide a rare glimmer of that June day in Brooklyn in 2017 when Tomanová first took one roll of 35 mm photographs with Kate and her now ex-partner, Odie, in their bathtub. It was an afternoon that resulted in her iconic image Kate and Odie (2017), the cover of her Young American book (2019).
For Tomanová, the experience of taking the photograph is the most powerful part of the process of photography and one could even argue that the resulting photograph itself is less important to her than the connection and experience of working with others. The photograph is simply a trace of that interaction.
At FOG Gallery, Tomanová introduces a new project she is currently shaping, Song of Exile that brings together portraiture and the photographs of the natural world. This creation, or linking, or punctuating a body of portraiture with landscape or perhaps it is the opposite, punctuating a body of landscape with portraiture is a compelling approach, particularly after Tomanová’s New York New York work, which merged portrait and place into one photograph. It also strongly links to Tomanová’s earlier Young American work in the sense that she was interested in photographing the social landscape at the same time she was taking self-portraits in nature as a means of seeing herself in the new environment of the United States. Thus, Song of Exile, a still nascent exploration, most likely into self and environment, and perhaps memory, continues themes with which Tomanová has been working for a decade.Clouds and Plums, Plums and Clouds – to say it fast and to repeat it over and over begins to sound like “Plumbs” and Clouds, an interesting opposition, then, that evokes, or merges both depth and height. Opposition and evocation, transitional states of matter or being, different states of mind—obfuscation, may be the perfect place to plumb the depths of clouds, to feel their swirling density, to breathe in their mist, to imagine what could be.
