Agathe Toman - ÉTÉ #023 - XL

High-end digigraphie print. This artwork is not sold framed to facilitate transport. Photograph with grain. Agathe Toman works her photographs like paintings, making it difficult to tell whether it is a painted work or a photographed one.
Photograph of a swimming pool, taken with the iPhone 15 Pro Max in Hossegor, summer 2025.

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

Listed with Sotheby's since 2021, her works have been auctioned three times, demonstrating her rapid rise and acceptance within prestigious art circles. Her remarkable contributions to various exhibitions, notably at Art Paris, have earned her great success, solidifying 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 acrylics with astonishing intensity, while her drawings, made with a Bic ballpoint pen, captivate with their hypnotic character. Agathe's photographs, of incredible 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 been pursuing for three years. This exploration enriches her conceptual process, allowing her to incorporate 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 focal points are not only present in her art; they are an integral part of her artistic identity.

His work has been recognized and celebrated in several renowned publications, including Forbes, L'Oeil, and Elle, marking his 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 transforms it into art.

BUT MY VISION:

My work focuses on the concept of the links between the psyche and the body.
Their ways of functioning together within their environments, the connections they forge, as well as the development of audible and inaudible vibrations that arise from them.
I explore themes such as identity, memory, human nature, and the relationship between the individual and their environment. My works are imbued with emotional depth and a certain tension, inviting the viewer to introspective reflection.

I inscribe this will into the very materiality of my works: resolutely abstract, in monochromes, nuanced, where darkness coexists with light, blue crackles upon contact with black, or illuminates alone. We are in the absence/presence of light.
My paintings, my drawings, and my photographs are each an absolute creation, detached from any imitation.

A meticulous connection between my hands and the pigments, charcoals, ballpoint pen, and paints applied on paper or canvas. My techniques of execution never repeat themselves, and the result is always foreign. Thus, I work to fix the movement of the material, the density of the light, to infuse it with myself, for the development of your memory.
There is always something we did not suspect. Something unexpected. The unspeakable.
The emergence of a truly unique fingerprint, my works are self-portraits, portraits of parts of myself.

I say that my creations are "materializations of psychic states," human landscapes, threads of my soul, inviting others to blend into them.
Their value is not aesthetic; it lies in the vibrations that my works create in the viewer. These are two sensitivities that meet, no longer two separate individuals. It is a living process. I consider them as active beings, creating unique bonds between us. The viewer also becomes a creator of the work; it finally comes to life.
I commit to a journey towards a new vision of its Being, the world, oneself, and others.

If the viewer now allows themselves to be invited, it is psychic resonances that align and harmonize into a single symphony, and a dialogue begins to establish itself. A distortion 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 within them, for words to resonate.
What matters is what the work evokes in us, and the outcome of this encounter.


Psychic suffering is linked to everything that escapes the process of subjective symbolization. We suffer from what is psychically blocked or awaiting psychic inscription. Humans suffer not only because of events or certain thoughts but because certain processes within them have not found a mirror, echo, listening, or receptacle and thus remain in wandering.