Opening reception: 18 September, 6.30 - 9 pm
The Sunday Painter is pleased to present Sherwood Forest, Tomas Harker’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Extending his long-standing engagement with found imagery—particularly film stills marked by what he describes as an “uncanny punctum”—Harker reconstitutes these fragments through painting. In doing so, he tests how the strategies of film and photography can be translated into the material and temporal language of the medium, opening a space where memory, narrative, and perception become unsettled.
Harker’s works move beyond fixed notions of selfhood, instead probing the porous boundaries between inner experience and outward appearance. Identity emerges not as a static essence but as a performance—an unstable negotiation that recalls historical conceptions of the “persona” as mask while also speaking to contemporary conditions in which selfhood is increasingly mediated by representation. Paint itself becomes an active agent in this process: layered, textured, and repeatedly reworked so that concealment and revelation operate in tandem. The resulting images carry a quiet uncanniness, where traces of fairytale slip into reality, not to offer escape but to expose the fragile structures through which perception and identity are constructed.
A new publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring texts by Harker and critic Phillippa Snow. Bringing together preparatory studies, digital collages, and cultural and art-historical references, the book situates Sherwood Forest within the wider arc of Harker’s investigation into distortion, memory, and the mechanics of representation.
Tomas Harker (b. 1990, Worksop UK) lives and works in London. Selected solo exhibitions include: The Lightness of Being, Nicodim, Los Angeles, US (2024); Multiple Choice Fairytale Ending, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2023); I haven’t been Sleeping, Screw Gallery, Leeds, UK (2021); Third Nature, Copeland Gallery, London, UK (2021); A Sea in Suspense, Bo.lee Gallery, London, UK (2019). Group exhibitions include: Ordinary Things, Workplace Gallery, London, UK (2025); Remain in Light: Tomas Harker / Laurent Proux / Robert Yarber, Nicodim, Los Angeles, US (2025); New Ancients, Guts Gallery, London, UK (2023); The Artist is Present, Guts Gallery, London, UK (2022); Apotrope, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2022); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London, UK (2021); There’s something about Painting, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium (2019); Cite, Bo.lee gallery, London, UK (2018); Syzygy, Leeds Arts University, Leeds, UK (2018). In 2018, Harker was awarded the Ingram Collection purchase prize.
