Elsa Tomkowiak is a French visual artist born in 1981 in Saint-Vallier, who trained at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon (ENSA Dijon). For more than fifteen years, she has been developing a radically chromatic site-specific practice that blends painting, sculpture, and monumental installation.
She works primarily with industrial plastic materials—sails, PVC film, tape, tarps, and cardboard—which she cuts, layers, suspends, or stretches across the space. These translucent materials interact with natural light to create vibrant environments that are both substantial and ethereal. Paint is no longer applied to a surface: it unfolds in space, transforming the perception of an entire place. Elsa Tomkowiak draws on a broad tradition of painting, from Simon Hantaï to Katharina Grosse, which she extends into the public realm.
In 2025, at the initiative of National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet, Elsa Tomkowiak will take over the colonnade of the Palais-Bourbon with *Echo*, a work created specifically for the occasion. She is supported by the FRAC Pays de la Loire, the Maison des Arts de Malakoff, and the City of Nantes, and is listed in the DDA Bretagne network (Artists’ Documents). Her international projects include the ARTZUID Biennial in Amsterdam (2019), Passages Insolites in Quebec City, and Into Color at the Merchant House Gallery in Amsterdam (2021). In France, she has taken over hospitals, tunnels, suspension bridges, cathedrals, and industrial wastelands from Nantes to Mulhouse.
Elsa Tomkowiak explores color as a living material, capable of transforming places and upsetting perceptions. Straddling the border between painting, sculpture and architecture, she creates monumental site-specific installations, conceived as environments to be traversed, experienced and inhabited. Her works take on a variety of spaces - bridges, tunnels, cathedrals, wastelands, rivers or heritage buildings - to create sensitive, immersive landscapes.
