Agathe Toman

AGATHE TOMAN (born 1989) is a French-Austrian-Czech artist whose transdisciplinary practice brings together painting, drawing, photography and poetic writing.

After studying at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, she worked for several years as a designer within French haute couture houses in Paris before choosing to devote herself fully to her own artistic practice. Based in the Landes in southwest France, she lives and works between Hossegor and Paris.

Her work explores the inner human experience as a living traversal — at the intersection of poetry, philosophy and contemporary research on the psyche and perception. Painting, notebooks, photography and writing form a unified field of artistic investigation. 

Since 2025, she has been represented by Mala Gallery and is a member of the Fondation Taylor. Her work entered an institutional collection following the acquisition of a drawing by the BIC Foundation in December 2025. Her works are held in several private collections and have been auctioned at Sotheby’s. In April 2026, she participates in Art Paris. 

Alongside her artistic practice, she has been pursuing research in psychoanalysis and neuroscience in Paris for the past five years. She is also the author of a first poetry collection, "You Will Have to Learn to Smile Again", and is currently preparing a new bilingual book.

Artistic Statement
I approach painting and drawing as one explores a territory — moving through matter, gesture, and the uncertainty of what may emerge. 

The work does not begin in the studio. For a long time something takes shape elsewhere, in observation and lived experience. The studio is where this process finds form. I do not invent images. I allow them to appear. Matter is my first language. Matter is my memory, deposited onto the canvas. My works can be seen as materializations of psychic states — interior landscapes shaped by
tensions and silences. A mythological inner traversal of the living. This research unfolds through my latest body of work titled "The Forest", where painting and drawing become ways of advancing through an inner territory, allowing what already exists to take form.

Representation    
Mala Gallery, France (since 2025)

Exhibitions (selection)    
2026 — Art Paris (with Mala Gallery)    
2025 — Inaugural Exhibition, Mala Gallery, Nice    
2025 — Antics Art Fair, Namur    
2021 — The Bird, Solo Exhibition, Hossegor    
2020 — Corpus Animae, Solo Exhibition, Normandy    
2018 — Phantoms, Solo Exhibition, Paris

Collections    
2025 — BIC Foundation (institutional collection)    
Works held in private collections internationally

Auctions    
Sotheby’s — Modern & Contemporary Discoveries (Cologne, 2023)    
Sotheby’s — Living Contemporary (Paris, 2022)    
Sotheby’s — Contemporary Curated (Paris, 2021)

Publications    
2025 — You Will Have to Learn to Smile Again (poetry)

Upcoming — bilingual poetry book (FR/EN)

Education & Research    
Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Paris    
Research in psychoanalysis & neuroscience, Paris (since 2020)

Affiliation    
Fondation Taylor (since 2025)