“Marie shows you who she is and who she was, and somewhere in there, if we could only read the tea leaves, is the outline of who she will become.” - Lucy Sante, It Was Once My Universe
Story is powerful. And so is narrative. But so is image. Marie Tomanova's story, her narrative, is something that has been well-established and barely warrants an extended discussion here. In short, growing up in a small community in South Moravia, Czech Republic on the border with Austria, Tomanova would draw in the dirt with a stick while her family worked their small plots of land, tending their vineyards, apricot orchards, and vegetable gardens. And she dreamed of becoming an artist, this young girl touching the dirt, the soil that sustained her family. The story, told like this, echoes that of Giorgio Vasari's account in the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) of the discovery of the proto-Renaissance artist Giotto by the established artist Ciambue who, when passing through a small town, discovered the young Giotto who “...was for ever drawing, on stones, on the ground, or on sand, something from nature, or in truth anything that came into his fancy.” According to Vasari, “without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature,” Giotto's drawing of a sheep made Ciambue “stop short in the utmost amazement.”
Perhaps unfortunately, Tomanova had no such happy accident, no Ciambue passing through the small field in the shade of the Iron Curtain, in the shadow of the border that divided and closed off East from West. She was without this fabulous, and perhaps eminently questionable, story or myth of artistic discovery and mentorship. And so, for two decades, blind to any exterior validation, she continued to draw, and journal, to focus on herself and the natural world around her – the fields, the hills, the ponds, the interior landscapes of her feelings. And then she had a big moment, she was accepted to art school in Brno, Czech Republic and ultimately received an MFA in painting. But in a system that upheld the very outdated and flaccid tenets of naturalistic academicism, she struggled – her expressionistic examination of self and environment was not appreciated for its emotional potential, for its search for identity, for the deeper meanings that come with act of self-portraiture and reflection on the self.
It is something special when an artist engages in self-portraiture — I think of Egon Schiele, one of Tomanova's early influences, whose lines bear the emotional weight of youth and struggle, perhaps the very things that drew her to him. I also think of Rembrandt, and of course, without making any sort of direct comparison with Tomanova, that would be almost entirely frivolous, I cannot help but think of the enigmatic drive to represent the self, as an artist — to create self-portrait. And I mention Rembrandt because while the work of these artists may not lend itself to direct comparison, the urge to self-represent may. Over his lifetime, Rembrandt is said to have created nearly 80 self-portraits in a variety of mediums — paintings, drawings, prints. And this desire to continually reveal and represent the self through artistic expression binds together a rather disparate cadre of artists, from Rembrandt to Schiele, and Ludwig Kirchner, too, Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, and Tomanova. There is a thread here that suggests a profound sensitivity and courage for introspection that strives to more deeply understand what it means to be oneself, to understand what it is to be human.
The ideas of nature (dirt, rocks, trees, roots), feeling, connection, memory, home, identity, seeing, and belonging are vital to understanding Tomanova's Self-Portraits in Nature (2015-). This ongoing series, developed concurrently with her Young American portraits (2014-19) that firmly established her reputation, had its impetus in Tomanova's earliest photographic work in the United States, Displacements (2012-14), a body of work created as a result of her struggle to find herself, to see herself, in the vastness of the United States and to quell her loneliness and longing for the home she had left behind in Mikulov, Czech Republic. While there are both a drawing and journaling practice in conjunction with the photographs, it is the images that speak most powerfully. As a whole, they are a curious binary that alternate between an adventurous spirit of youth, sexuality, freedom, and feelings of displacement, distance, and distraught. Photos support this duality. Some emblematize a sense of raw freedom, but others, with tears in her eyes, head shrouded or entirely absent, display a yawning sense of loneliness, and a questioning or dismissal of self. Part of Tomanova's story, the reason she came to New York City, is that she wanted to be photographed by Ryan McGinley after seeing his photograph India (Wolf) (2009), because the image profoundly struck her (and she identified with the wolf as a spirit animal). Story, narrative, myth, image — I think of Jospeh Beuys' I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), a New York City performance during which Beuys traveled from Germany directly to René Block Gallery and lived with a coyote for three days and then immediately returned to Germany.
While it is true a coyote is not a wolf, in the other world of the artist it may not matter, much. With Beuys, the coyote was mostly docile, but occasionally hostile. For Tomanova, America could be like the coyote. While new experiences and opportunities to try new things were delightful, they could be superficial. She had a deep sense of not belonging, which is why she began to take self-portraits in nature, so she could actually see herself in America, while at the same time, connecting with her home, her childhood, her past, the hours playing in the dirt as a child, dragging cut vines and branches through fields, leaving traces of her path in the hours of toil, dreaming and looking at the leaves and sky while sunbathing next to a pond. This is the essence of Self-Portraits in Nature. They are about Tomanova seeing herself in the American landscape as a means of belonging, and the touch of the natural world on her nude body as a means of connecting with home and memory. The difficulty of this — seeing herself, belonging — is evident in an image such as Self-portrait (Birch Woods) (2016). With head and majority of body hidden behind the trunk of a birch tree, Tomanova is barely visible, almost lost in the landscape. In these images there is an attempt to relive memory and connect with nature, but the process can be fraught, as can be seen in Self-portrait (Moss) (2016), in which Tomanova has placed herself lying in a bed of moss under the branches of a fallen tree, a space difficult to access and is almost evocative of entrapment, perhaps related to her difficulties and fears in the United States in 2016 that saw a meteoric rise in conservatism and intolerance toward immigrants (issues Tomanova addressed more directly in her 2014-19 Young American work as she tried to also fit into the American social landscape).
While the aspect of visceral connection is present throughout the body of work, photographs such as Self-portrait (Deeper), Self-portrait (Content), and Self-portrait (Roots), all from 2016, speak directly to the merging of body and environment. For Tomanova, it is this moment of connection between body and nature that is critical. It is performative. The act of taking the photograph is secondary and is just the trace left behind of the feelings — emotional and physical — and memories that are the essence of this self-portraiture. For Tomanova, it is the experience of being connected, feeling the bark of the tree, being suspended in algae-green water, having her face buried in deep moss, breathing it in, muffling the sounds of the forest, the chattering of squirrels, evoking the long-ago memories of youth and places where she once felt comfortable and at home. It is a momentary respite, a communion. That many of these images are without head or face, those very things that make us most recognizable, speaks to a struggle with seeing herself clearly in this new place, a struggle with questions of belonging and identity, a struggle with questions of self.
By 2023, these struggles with questions of self, particularly with visibility and belonging so present in the earlier Self-Portraits in Nature, transform, with confidence, into an assertive work about identity that can be seen in Tomanova's Untitled Portraits (2023), so titled in part as an oblique reference to Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) but more so as a textual interrogation of the difference between self-portrait and portrait, self and others, the multiple possibilities for being; the multiple possibilities for the self. The work is about identity, or even identities. In this sense, it is also close to Sherman's series, a fact Tomanova acknowledges in her text accompanying the photographs in the special project for the aptly named magazine Shadowplay. She writes, “For Untitled Portraits I explored self-portraiture and created 20 different personas and rediscovered parts of myself in doing so. My inspiration was Cindy Sherman, and also those Andy Warhol Polaroids of famous people, esp. of downtown New York — with all their glam and fabulous expressive identities. I always longed to be part of that era.” In fact, it is really Tomanova herself who provides the key to understanding these images:
“Then I went the opposite direction. I always wanted to have a mustache. And the one I photographed myself with fits me so well. I sometimes use a boy’s name for myself – Mario. Here, I was finally Mario in full force. It gave me new sense of confidence, it brought up my cockiness, determination and extroversion, to yet another level than before.
I cherished all the other identities — posing as the Hollywood movie star, the New Jersey housewife, the spoiled boy from Miami with gold teeth, the Heidi-baby-doll from Austria, the successful business lesbian from Hamburg, the pink haired girl with gap in her teeth... all the things I am not really, but could have been, maybe even still be... I savored each one of the identities for all they had to offer — seeing myself with childish astonishment as somebody else, as somebody I didn’t know. It was deeply satisfying and very disturbing.
It stirred lots of questions for me. What is feminine and what is masculine? Where is the thin line that divide those binary stereotypes that I wish would not exist but are still very much there? What defines sexy? What makes me feel powerful and strong? Can I be perceived as powerful with big red lips and blond gorgeous hair on the same level as with a black bob?
How much do I subconsciously shape my look to be seen the way I want to be seen?
And is it really who I truly am?”
And so I conclude... I love seeing you Marie Tomanova. I really do. Because in your self-portraits I can see myself. Or parts of myself. Or parts of who I want to be. Your nude body in the landscape — it is free, and I can sense you are merging with nature, feeling it, remembering your childhood playing in earth and fields, drawing with sticks in the dirt, being alive among the leaves and endless rows of the vineyards. I can taste the grapes and feel the sea. I can feel all genders in you — stacks of smooth stones and deep, green moss. You curl in spaces I dream of. And I love seeing your new mustache and bright blue dress. Black leather and strong shoulders. Your big blonde hair speaks to me. And that rooftop is like a nest for me in New York City; I can look out and see who I want to be—Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can see Jerry Hall, the Factory and Warhol's Big Shot Polaroid, and is that Cindy Sherman on the horizon, so far away? I can see myself in you Marie Tomanova, all of you.
Text written by Thomas Beachdel