In her first solo exhibition in Paris, The Conundrum of the Organically Angular, Liliane Tomasko (b. 1967, Zurich) presents new abstract paintings that engage with the architecture and legacy of Le Corbusier. Maison La Roche, built between 1923 and 1925, exemplifies Le Corbusier’s early concept of the house as a living organism – a space to be experienced physically and rhythmically through circulation, color and light. Tomasko’s vital, gesturally abstract works unfold as painterly topographies of the unconscious, reflecting on inner states and spatial experience. They are in constant movement, resonating with the building’s modernist conception and its enduring genius loci.

Long engaged with themes of the subconscious, emotion, and dream, Liliane Tomasko creates dense, gestural abstractions, layering luminous bands and sweeping lines over translucent, opaque, or dissolving color fields. Her latest works explore a heightened plasticity, echoing the rhythms of natural growth – leaf forms, florid openings, entangled branches and mangrove-like plants – while hinting at modernist vocabularies from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, at times even to the iconography of comic books, or tags of graffiti. Some shapes push outward with forceful clarity, like an exclamation or sudden thought; others recede or shift, embodying a state of transition. Echoing at times de Kooning’s gestural freedom or the precision of calligraphy, they become gesture and trace, inscription and expression of the “inner jungle” Tomasko herself invokes. In titling several of these works „Shapeshifter“, she embraces transformation not only as motif but as method – a metaphor for the mutable self embedded in her process.

Tomasko’s dialogue with Le Corbusier becomes especially tangible in works created in direct response to Maison La Roche. Fragmented curtains trembling in an unseen draft recall her earlier figurative work, while the interplay of angular and rounded forms responds to the building’s dynamic architecture. Even works made independently seem to resonate with the space’s fluid volumes, colored walls and shifting light, reflecting Le Corbusier’s idea of the „promenade architecturale“ as a lived, perceptual experience. Maison La Roche itself emerges as a kind of „Shapeshifter“: a structure at once geometric and sensuous that continuously transforms in motion. The encounter between Tomasko’s organic abstraction and Le Corbusier’s architectural vision opens a new dimension of spatial and emotional permeability – where interior and exterior, movement and form, gesture and space converge in a continuous flow.

A catalogue, published in collaboration with Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, will feature texts by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall and Loïc Le Gall, as well as a conversation between Liliane Tomasko and Barbara Huttrop. It is scheduled for release at the end of September.
The exhibition is presented by Fondation Le Corbusier in collaboration with Barbara Huttrop | Art Projects.

Liliane Tomasko lives and works in Nyack, New York, and Aix-en-Provence. Following exhibitions at the Hôtel des Arts, Centre Méditerranéen d’Art, Toulon (2008), and Château La Coste in southern France (2019), her exhibition at Maison La Roche marks her first solo exhibition in Paris. Tomasko’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums and institutions such as the Millennium Gallery, Museums Sheffield (2025); the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, and the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos (both 2023); the Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (both 2022); Newlands House Gallery, Petworth House and Park, Petworth, and Kunstmuseum Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg (both 2021); Museo MATE, Lima, and Rockland Center for the Arts, New York (2018/19).