Originally from Germany’s rural North Sea coast, not far from Bremen and its famous town musicians, Kim first trained as a furniture maker before turning her focus to art and design. She had begun painting in her teens, long before studying it formally, and that early passion became the foundation for a lifelong creative path.
In her twenties, she relocated to Cologne, Germany’s vibrant media city, where she held her first major urban exhibitions and received early press attention. Around the same time, she began designing sets and costumes for theatre and opera, and her passion for visual storytelling soon became a full-time pursuit.
In the late 1990s, Kim met her husband and joined him in San Francisco in 2001. There, she designed and contributed to hundreds of theatre productions throughout the Bay Area and beyond, earning several awards for her work. After moving to Los Angeles in 2010, she expanded into themed entertainment, collaborating with some of the industry’s most recognized names, including Walt Disney Imagineering, NBC Universal, and Universal Studios Japan. Her work with Universal Studios Japan also took her to Osaka, where she lived and worked as part of the creative team.
Her production design work for television has included projects for McDonald’s, DreamWorks, Pepsi Cola, and L’Oréal.
Now living between Malta, the US, and Germany, Kim has come full circle, devoting herself more fully to her lifelong love of art and painting.
Kim has exhibited in both Europe and the United States. She is drawn to large-scale work, and her abstract, expressive paintings emphasize texture, movement, and color. Built in layered stages, her paintings develop a rich complexity that invites viewers to form their own interpretations of her lush combinations of color and surface.
Although representational painting has always been part of her repertoire, Kim has recently begun exploring a secondary body of work: imaginary, moody, and slightly surreal subject matter, as seen in her new Lost Highways series.
“I express things with color, texture, and shape that I couldn’t say any other way. For me, painting is a profound process. Reality must stay outside; I am limited only by my imagination.”
Kim A. Tolman
Kim A. Tolman