Elsa Tomkowiak is a French visual artist born in Saint-Vallier in 1981. Trained at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon (ENSA Dijon), she has been developing a singular body of work for over fifteen years, at the crossroads of painting, sculpture, monumental installation and architecture. Her work is characterized by a radical approach to color, seen as a living material, a vector of immersion, spatiality and sensory emotion.
Elsa Tomkowiak's work is part of the field of contemporary in situ art. She intervenes in public spaces as well as in natural or heritage sites, transforming the perception of places through powerful, ephemeral color devices. She works mainly with industrial plastic materials: sails, PVC films, ribbons, tarpaulins and cardboard, which she cuts, superimposes, suspends or stretches in space. These translucent materials, chosen for their interaction with light, enable the creation of vibrant environments, both massive and aerial, where paint is no longer applied to a surface but unfurls in volume.
Each project is conceived specifically for the site it occupies, following a logic of dialogue with the environment, architecture, natural light and the circulation of the body. The artist creates immersive works in which the viewer is invited to wander, feel and experience. The pictorial gesture, originally frontal, becomes spatial, dynamic and often performative. Elsa Tomkowiak claims a direct, physical relationship with color, heir to a broader tradition of painting, from Simon Hantaï to Katharina Grosse, which she pushes towards volume and public space.
His work has been presented in numerous contexts in France and abroad: galleries, museums, festivals, heritage buildings or industrial wastelands. Highlights include the installation "OUT / Phébus's Moire" in Amsterdam, as part of the ARTZUID Biennial in 2019, or in Quebec City as part of Passages Insolites, where a tunnel of colored bands floated above the water, altering the perception of the urban landscape. In 2021, she was invited by the Merchant House gallery in Amsterdam for the "Into Color" exhibition, where she conceived a total environment around light, climate and atmospheric states.
In France, she has multiplied her interventions in atypical locations: hospitals, tunnels, suspension bridges, lakes or rivers, cathedrals or art centers, from Nantes to Mulhouse, via Metz, Annecy, Saint-Gervais, Dijon or Amiens.
In 2025, at the initiative of the President of the French National Assembly, Ms. Yaël Braun-Pivet, artist Elsa Tomkowiak took over the steps in front of the colonnade of the Palais-Bourbon, installing a colorful work of art, "Echo", specifically created for the occasion.
This carte blanche, designed to celebrate the dialogue between contemporary art and heritage, is set against the majestic backdrop of the quays of the Seine.
By integrating her installations into hospital or urban contexts, she questions the place of the body in public space and the restorative power of color. Her art is as much about sensation as it is about construction: it is based on a rigorous logic of composition, nourished by chromatic research and attention to gesture, rhythm, light and movement.
His often spectacular installations are never purely decorative: they engage the eye, solicit attention and open up perceptive passages in the banality of everyday life.
A demanding artist, Elsa Tomkowiak is supported by several artistic and cultural structures, including the FRAC Pays de la Loire, the Maison des Arts de Malakoff and the City of Nantes. Her work has been the subject of numerous publications and critical analyses, notably as part of the DDA Bretagne network (Documents d'artistes), the magazine Point Contemporain and several exhibition catalogs.
She is regularly invited for creative residencies, collaborative projects or public commissions, confirming her place in the contemporary artistic landscape as one of the most singular voices in site-specific chromatic installation.
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.
