Agathe Toman - ÉTÉ #023 - XL 7/15

High-end impression photographique on glossy fine art paper. This work is not sold framed to facilitate transport. Grainy photography. Agathe Toman treats her photographs like paintings, so it is difficult to tell whether it is a painted work or a photographed one. Printed in Hossegor, France.
Swimming pool photograph, captured on an iPhone 15 Pro Max in Hossegor, summer 2025.

Agathe Toman, artist listed at Sotheby’s since 2021.
Artist biography:
Born in 1989, of French, Austrian, and Czech origins, Agathe Toman is a French multidisciplinary artist whose talent ranges from painting to poetry, including drawing and photography. Based between Hossegor and Paris, Agathe establishes herself as an up-and-coming figure on the contemporary art scene, appreciated both nationally and internationally.

Listed at Sotheby’s since 2021, her works have been auctioned three times, testimony to her rapid rise and acceptance in prestigious art circles. Her notable contributions to various fairs, notably Art Paris, have earned her immense success, consolidating her presence in numerous private collections around the world.

Agathe’s palette favors deep shades of black and blue, colors that are the essence of her creation. Her paintings use pure pigments and intensely vibrant acrylics, while her drawings, made with a Bic ballpoint pen, captivate with their hypnotic character. Agathe’s photographs, of extraordinary depth, as well as her poetry kaleidoscopes, enrich her universe with an abstract language that defines her work.

Beyond her artistic practice, Agathe is also deeply engaged in the study of psychoanalysis, which she has pursued for three years. This exploration enriches her conceptual process, allowing her to integrate profound psychological dimensions into her art.

Agathe does not dissociate her art from her social commitments. With unwavering determination, she focuses her work on crucial themes such as mental health and the environment. These lines of thought are not only present in her art; they are an integral part of her artistic identity.

Her work has been recognized and celebrated in several renowned publications, including Forbes, L’Oeil, and Elle, marking her notable impact in the field of contemporary art.

Agathe Toman continues to fascinate and inspire a global audience, offering through her works a window into the complexity of the human experience as she perceives it and transposes it into art.

"MY VISION:

My work focuses on the notion of the links between the psyche and the corporeal.
Their modes of functioning together within their environments, the connections they build, and the elaboration of tangible and intangible vibrations that arise from them.
I explore themes such as identity, memory, human nature, and the relationship between the individual and his environment. My works carry emotional depth and a certain tension, inviting the viewer to an introspective reflection.

I place this intention within the very materiality of my works: resolutely abstract, in monochromes, nuanced, where darkness coexists with clarity, where blue crackles in contact with black, or lights up alone. We are in the absence/presence of light.
My paintings, my drawings, and my photographs are each an absolute creation, free from imitation.

A meticulous rapport between my hands and the pigments, the charcoal, the ballpoint pen, and the paints applied on paper or canvas. My execution techniques never repeat themselves, and the result is always foreign. I thus work to fix the movement of matter, the density of light, to infuse myself into it, for the creation of your memory.
There is always something one could not have guessed. Something unexpected. This ineffable thing.
The emergence of a decidedly unique imprint, my works are self-portraits, portraits of parts of me.

I say that my creations are “materializations of psychic states,” human landscapes, threads of my soul, inviting others to merge with them.
Their value is not aesthetic; it lies in the vibrations my works create in the viewer. These are two sensibilities meeting, no longer two separate identities. It is a living process. I consider them living beings, forming unprecedented connections between Us. The viewer becomes a creator of the work as it comes to life.
I commit to a path toward a new vision of Being, of the world, of self, and of others.

If the viewer now allows themselves to be invited, psychical resonances align and harmonize into a single symphony, a dialogue begins to establish itself. An anamorphosis of their soul takes shape, an elusive reflection. It is a poetic experience.
An intense and powerful presence. A demanding experience.

I want my works to refine human minds, sharpen souls, and for emotions to find an echo, for words to resonate there.
What matters is what the work mobilizes in us, and the result of this encounter."

"Psychic suffering is linked to everything that escapes the process of subjectivizing symbolization. We suffer from what is psychically blocked, or awaiting psychical inscription. The human being suffers not only from events or certain thoughts but because certain processes within him have not found a mirror, an echo, a listening ear, a receptacle, and remain thus in wandering." — René Roussillon, Manual of Psychology and Psychiatry of General Clinical Practice, page 146.