Liliane Tomasko: The Psyche of the Portrait

A composite image of three abstract works. The first image is split in half and seems to depict a female figure getting ready. She wears a black dress and is adjusting a navy blue hat atop her pale blue face (without features). The hat looks as though it has pink flowers and orange feathers, represented through thick brushstrokes.

The second image is of a grey, abstracted female shape with visible limbs in facial features, seemingly reclining. The figure is outlined with black paint and there is a large pink circle by the torso of the figure.

The third image is split in half vertically. The left half shows an abstracted figure with long blonde hair and what seems to be a patterned top, with red, white, yellow and brown sections. The background is white, brown and blue. The right half is more abstract, with swathes of pink, white and blue paint mixed together in brushstrokes. There is a green and blue section in the top right corner. The background is beige.

Liliane Tomasko, Portrait of a Psyche split in half (van Dongen), Psyche (tunnelling through forbidden areas), Portrait of a Psyche doubled up (Auerbach), 2025 © the artist

The Psyche of the Portrait sees New York-based visual artist Liliane Tomasko respond to examples of portraiture from Sheffield’s Visual Art collection with her own abstract vocabulary. Shedding light on the ever-changing human psyche, the exhibition presents new work by Tomasko directly responding to portraits by Frank Auerbach, Pierre Bonnard, Kees Van Dongen, and Eduardo Paolozzi.

An abiding interest in the subconscious runs as a thread through the work of Liliane Tomasko – whether interrogating the uncanny of the seeming emptiness of the corner of a room, to the rumpled sheets of a slept-in bed, her dynamic, sweeping brushstrokes converge to erase, transcend, interrogate, or reframe any recognisable origins. For The Psyche of the Portrait, Tomasko takes a bold new direction, responding to four specific portraits she has chosen that are in, or on loan to, Sheffield’s collection.

What emerges in Tomasko’s new paintings, created especially for the exhibition, deftly draws parallels between the creation of those original works and the historical development of psychological study in the 20^th century. Together, they question the psychological power dynamics of artist and sitter, query the role of the subconscious in the creative act, and reimagine parables in the context of our 21^st-century anxieties.

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