TOMMY HARRISON

Harrison begins by drawing directly onto the canvas using tailor’s chalk, establishing an initial framework for each composition that becomes quickly discarded. Operating without preconceived logic, the process by which images emerge is circuitous, with the artist responding in stages to his own previous marks and gestures until a direction begins to reveal itself.

This provides a blueprint, from which nascent formal and figurative imagery emerges, creating a point of tension from which Harrison can continue to build or dismantle with the application of oil paint. Allowing for a kind of ordered spontaneity to guide his process, as opposed to contrived planning.

Harrison slowly negotiates a plurality of possible compositional outcomes, working on multiple canvases simultaneously over weeks and months. His paintings are often anchored by a motif or found subject derived from art history and wider visual culture. Cropped bodies, animals, theatrical curtains, ornate patterns, anonymous landscapes or claustrophobic interiors, are appropriated and deployed as pure form, stripped of narrative or didactic function.

Tommy Harrison graduated with MFA in painting at the Manchester School of Art (UK) in 2023, for which he received the Haworth Trust Painting Scholarship in 2020. This year the artist will present a solo exhibition of new works at Iris Art Museum, Suzhou (CN). A new publication will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Selected exhibitions: Displays, GRIMM, London (UK); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); The Silver Cord, Huxley-Parlour, London (UK); Double Bind, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Self-Portraits, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Tone Cluster, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Centre of the Periphery, Pipeline Contemporary, London (UK) and THE BELLY AND THE GUTS, Alice Amati, London (UK).

Courtesy GRIMM, Amsterdam/London/New York.