Nino Mier Gallery
Liliane Tomasko: POEM THINGS
3 September – 18 October 2025
Evening
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow
Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;
and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs—
and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing,
grows alternately stone in you and star.
Nino Mier Gallery is delighted to announce POEM THINGS, Liliane Tomasko's inaugural solo exhibition at its 62 Crosby Street location in New York, running from September 3 to October 18, 2025.
The exhibition's title draws from the German concept of Dinggedicht ("poem of things" or "thing poem"), which focuses on imbuing objects with their own voice and significance. Tomasko's paintings aim to transcend abstract forms, creating a dialogue between painting, poetry, and the world. Following her critically acclaimed 2023 exhibition Portrait of the Self in Los Angeles, POEM THINGS showcases Tomasko's distinct abstract approach to painting, where literature serves as a crucial element.
For this series, Tomasko embeds fragments of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Evening" from The Book of Images (1902) as painting subtitles, inviting viewers into a realm of poetic synesthesia where free association is key. In this way, and inspired by such modernists as Vassily Kandinsky and Willem de Kooning, Tomasko's art defies conventional categories.
The diptych POEM THING (Slowly the evening puts on the garments held for it by a rim of ancient trees) resonates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. The painting visually embodies psychosomatic sensations, blurring the lines between internal experience (evoked by gestural red marks in the left panel) and the external world (represented by sky blue shades in the right panel). This interplay reflects Merleau-Ponty's "chiasm," where subject and object are intertwined, emphasizing the lived body as the foundation of experience and painterly expression. Tomasko's incorporation of vibrant colors and expressive gesture with Rilke's verse encourages contemplation of the intricate relationship between inner sensations and external perception, engaging the viewer's visceral, and thus embodied, experience.
An avid reader with an affinity for language and words, Tomasko’s titles have consistently hinted at a literary bent, using her own prose. This literary connection became even more prominent in her 2024 project titled The Artist’s Eye held in Dublin. There, she strategically integrated the words of Charles Dickens as a significant and socially engaged constituent within her own exhibition text that accompanied the paintings. Now, with POEM THINGS, Tomasko embarks on a new chapter, interweaving abstract mark-making and fragments of Rilke’s verse. This creates a powerful dialogue between painting’s visual elements and metaphoric synesthesia, challenging the norms of abstract painting by offering a potent pathway for engaging with art on a highly subjective and phenomenological level.
Liliane Tomasko (b.1967, Zurich, CH; lives and works in New York, NY) earned her BFA at the Chelsea College of Art & Design, and her MFA at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, FR; Sheffield Museums, UK; Centro de Arte Contemporanéo Caja de Burgos (CAB) Burgos, SP; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, IE; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, IE; Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, DE; The Edward Hopper Museum and Study Center, NY; Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, FR; Kunsthalle Rostock, DE; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the New York Studio School, NY; IVAM-Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Valencia, SP; among many others. Tomasko’s work is held in many public and private collections, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, US; the Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Richmond, VA, US; The Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the George Washington University, DC; the Albertina Collection, Vienna, AS; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, NO; IVAM-Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, SP; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, DE; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE; Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, DE; Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, DE; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, CH; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, LI; Collection du Conseil Départemental du Var, FR; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, IE, among others.