Toma Melania

Born in Padova, Italy, Melania Toma lives and works in London. Her practice incorporates its own language of symbols and forms, encompassing elements - both new and atavistic, prehistoric and cellular, growing and decaying - expressed through sculpture, fabric and painting. Fertility symbols, birds, fish and flowers form the backbone of this vocabulary of forms. Toma's works are fundamentally organic. His paintings seem to transform into found alien creatures, pulsating with a hermaphroditic fertility characterised by the movement of organs and bones in a synchronous dance. Toma's pictorial process makes dualities collide: large, fast marks coexist with thin, slow line drawings; thin layers of paint sit alongside coagulations of thick sand; the softness and sensuality of threads juxtapose with the vibrant intensity of colour on raw canvas; and overcrowded planes of canvas coexist with silent areas of negative space.

RECENT SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITION

'I Want You To Be Weak, As Weak As I Am' at Tube Culture Hall, Milan, curated by Vittoria Beltrame, September-October 2024, Five Hearts (Solo), Kristin Hjellegjerde, London; Re-rooted: The Quiet Politics of Plants, Cooke Latham gallery, London; Joseph Albers Foundation Residency, Senegal. In Rapture, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London(2024); Embodied Selfhood, Pictorum Gallery, London (2024); Studio Response, Saatchi Gallery London (2023); Sistema Tempo, MO.CA: Centro Per Le Nuove Culture, Brescia, IT (2023); MATTER , Flowers Gallery, London Uk (2023); As Soon as the Sun Sets, (Solo), Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London, UK (2023); Soft Monuments, Frestonian Gallery, London, UK (2023); 2 for 1: a dialogue with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals,Thorp Stavri, HAZE, Hypha Studios, London, UK (2023); London Design Biennale, Italian Pavilion with Triennale Milano, Somerset House, London, UK (2023); London Grads Now.21, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2021) ; Postcards from Isolation, Archaeological Museum Innsbruck (2021).