Tomas Harker

Overview
Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter
Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter
Tomas Harker’s works address the nature of meaning in conditions of mediated experience and hyperreal saturation. Over the last several years, the artist’s practice has increasingly blurred the lines between fairytale and reality, often by subtly manipulating notions of the uncanny. The mythologies leaking into his recent works are not simply an exploration of fantasy, however; rather, they act as a point of entry to the abstract network of thoughts through which they come into being, suggesting that a real-world circumstance is not quite what it seems. 
Existing on the fringes of popular culture, Harker's practice often draws from a variety of image production and distribution systems in an attempt to make sense of a cosmic order becoming increasingly disordered. His paintings reflect the increasing murkiness and confusion of contemporary life, whilst remaining mindful of the dynamics of power benefiting from uncertainty. In spite of their relationship to complex, significant systemic and social issues, Harker’s work manages to retain a lightness of touch, a sense of irreverence, through the inclusion of mythical aesthetics. Unlike magical realism, however, his paintings act as thought experiments – providing the viewer with material by which interpretative systems can be created. They insist that we move beyond defined aesthetic language and into a mode of thinking capable of establishing connections between disparate chunks of metaphor, reference and symbolism as a means of better understanding the physical sensations capable of dominating experience, opinion and existence. Harker's works therefore venture into a new realm, where representations of the unreal are presented as symbols, or emissaries, of alternate understandings.
Works
  • Tomas Harker, The Wrong Ferrari, 2022
    Tomas Harker
    The Wrong Ferrari, 2022
    Oil on canvas
    200 x 140 cm
    78 3/4 x 55 1/8 in
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  • Tomas Harker, SSSecret Meeting, 2023
    Tomas Harker
    SSSecret Meeting, 2023
    Oil on canvas
    90 x 110 cm
    35 3/8 x 43 1/4 in
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Guts Exhibitions 
Press
CV
Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter
Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter

B.1990, Worksop, UK. Lives and works in London.

 

Education

2018-2020 MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London

2015-2018 BA Fine Art, Leeds Arts University, Leeds

 

Solo Exhibitions

2023 Multiple Choice Fairytale Ending, The Sunday Painter, London, UK

2021 I haven’t been Sleeping, Screw Gallery, Leeds, UK

2021 Third Nature, Copeland Gallery, London, UK

2019 A Sea in Suspense, Bo.lee Gallery, London, UK

 

Group Exhibitions

2023 New Ancients, Guts Gallery, London, UK

2022 The Artist is Present, Guts Gallery, London, UK

2022 Apotrope, Cob Gallery, London, UK

2022 Psychic Self-Defense, Galerie Mighela Shama, Geneva, Switzerland

2021 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London, UK

2019 There’s something about Painting, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium

2018 Cite, Bo.lee gallery, London, UK

2018 Syzygy, Leeds Arts University, Leeds, UK

 

Awards

2018 Ingram Collection Purchase prize