2025 - Against the Tide - Wilma Tabacco

Against the Tide

Gallerysmith - June 19 -July 12, 2025

It’s a handsome studio in a converted former factory. All is well illuminated by an even southern light flooding through ample saw-tooth windows crossing the roof. What I see within testifies to self-discipline, to a workaholic. Fresh geometric paintings, and pieces in progress, hang around sheer white walls in a hall-size room. Several waist-high work benches topped with white Formica are positioned around the space, while upon them are painting materials and studio workbooks, some beginning to dog-ear through use.

Wilma Tabacco is evidently not one to relax in her workspace—the few seats are straight backed, firm, rather functional. There is no suggestion of leisure here, no comfy armchair or couch an artist might lounge in and unwind. Nor, unlike many studios, are there the alluring diversions of well-thumbed art books and glossy magazines scattered on tables or shelves. Instead, this interior emphatically speaks of an artist who paints, paints, paints, paints. And when she isn’t painting, she restlessly fills studio journals with gouache designs for potential canvases, oodles of them. As I’m making notes she picks up a workbook and shows me it, flicking through pages, each coloured configuration filling the page and dated in pencil, and she keeps going, leafing through scores of them, page after page after page, every design fresh, with geometry and colour scheme always changing. The same compositional format—flat frontal shapes layered over each other with a pale margin surround—is applied in paintings over on a side wall......

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© Wilma Tabacco
JUNE 2025