Marie Tomanová

Biography

Marie Tomanova (also known as Marie Tomanová, born 1984) is a Czech-born New York City–based artist. Her work focuses primarily on issues of identity and displacement. She first came to international attention with her first book, Young American, which celebrates individuality and youth, particularly in regard to gender, sexuality, and self-expression. Tomanova is the subject of a feature-length documentary film with HBO Europe by director Marie Dvorakova, World Between Us, which premiered at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2024.

== Early life and education == Tomanova was born in Valtice, a village in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic, near the Austrian border. She grew up in Czechoslovakia, coming of age during the post-Velvet Revolution (1989). Tomanova received an MFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic (2010).

== Career == After receiving her MFA, Tomanova left the Czech Republic in 2011 to work as an au pair in the United States. First in North Carolina, later in New York State. After moving in 2012 to New York City, she found work babysitting, cleaning, and cooking for privileged families. After viewing an exhibition of the work of the photographer Francesa Woodman (1958–1981) at the Guggenheim Museum in 2012, she found her creative outlet in photography, took night classes in photography from Keren Moscovitch at SVA in New York City, and began to photograph herself against the backdrop of the American landscape in an attempt to see and understand herself. Focused on themes of identity and belonging, this body of photographic self-portraiture work established her first series Displacements (2012–2016). Displacements gained the attention of curators working with the theme of feminism and beginning in 2015, Tomanova's work was soon included in numerous group exhibitions with a feminist focus, most notably at A.I.R. Gallery. Since 2016, she has been organising group and solo exhibitions, creating her own photo collections, being a model for prestigious magazines and brands, such as Forbes, Balenciaga and many more.

== Work ==

=== Curation (2016–2018) === Beginning in 2016, with her reputation as an artist becoming established, Tomanova embarked on co-curating a series of exhibitions at the Czech Center New York between 2016 and 2018 as part of a new exhibition, Youth Explosion: The New Bohemia, which in addition to her own work included a roster of emerging young, queer-identifying artists such as Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Michael Baily-Gates, and Ethan James Green. In 2017 she co-curated Baby, I Like It Raw: Post-Eastern Bloc Photography and Video, an exhibition that featured the work Slava Mogutin, Sasha Kurmaz, Anya Schiller, Irina Yulieva, as well as Tomanova herself. In 2018, Tomanova co-curated her final exhibition for the Czech Center New York, Muse Muse, for which she invited curators to present the work of artists. Included in this show were photographer Pixy Liao and painter Teresa Chromati.

=== Young American (2016–2019) === In 2018, Tomanova had her first solo art exhibition at the Czech Center New York, called Young American. Whereas Tomanova's Displacement series of work sought to allow her to view herself in the American landscape, in a series of portraits of young people with whom she strongly identified, Young American sought to connect her with the social landscape. She developed the Young American exhibition into a book by the same name that garnered international recognition. The Introduction was written by photographer Ryan McGinley.

=== New York New York (2016–2021) === Next work New York New York project was first exhibited at Live For The Weather, her 2020 exhibition for the European Month of Photography at the Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin in the fall of 2020. At that exhibition, her largest-to-date, she was approached to do a new book, with much of the work shot during the COVID pandemic. Tomanova's second book, New York New York, published in 2021 by Hatje Cantz with a foreword by musician Kim Gordon, is more significantly a reorientation as Tomanova begins to examine the relationship between people and place, rather than to express a connection to a social landscape. Like Young American, New York New York garnered international acclaim for its raw, straight forward images that celebrated the multiculturalism of New York City from the point of view of a Czech immigrant finding her way to the American dream.

=== It Was Once My Universe (2017–2021) ===