Harry Spike - Icarus' Wheel, 2025

The figure occupies the canvas like something half-surfaced from water.
In the foreground, a large male form fills the frame — blond-haired, its face
tilted upward with closed eyes, rendered in warm strata of ochre, sienna, and
grey-blue that shift and merge without ever settling into photographic clarity.
The body is both present and dissolving, its outlines softening into the ground
behind it: pinks and mauves, the pale triangle of an abstracted mountain, a
deep navy sky. Above, in the upper left, a second figure — smaller, vivid
coral, arms thrown wide — hovers or falls. This is Icarus: not crashing, not
screaming, but suspended, almost serene, caught in the wheel of his own
trajectory. The painting refuses to give you the catastrophe. It gives you instead
the feeling of being between.

Icarus’ Wheel is the centrepiece of Dig, Harry Spike’s
debut solo exhibition at Cob Gallery, London — a show about excavation, about
going beneath the surface of landscape, mythology, memory, and desire to find
the layers on which everything is built. The Icarus myth as Spike reads it is
not a cautionary tale about overreach; it is a meditation on suspension, on the
moment before resolution, on what it means to be between states. His Icarus is
warm, harmonious, and almost peaceful — an interpretation that finds grace
where the tradition finds disaster. Artsy, which included the work in its
selection of five artists on their radar in February 2026, noted the “dreamlike
state” of the composition and its “peaceful interpretation of the classical
Greek tragedy.”

The colour is the painting’s primary intelligence. Spike builds acrylic
in warm, overlapping layers that carry light rather than block it — the ochre
of the main figure’s hair against the cool grey-blue of his face; the deep
cranberry of the draped form in the right foreground; the coral of the floating
figure caught against the dark navy above. These are not arbitrary choices: the
warmth of the palette creates an emotional temperature that runs counter to the
myth’s usual register of cold tragedy. The painting feels like late afternoon
light, the moment when summer’s heat still holds but the shadows have begun to
extend. There is something fugitive and precious about it.

The face of the central figure — slightly blurred, as if seen through
glass or from a distance — is characteristic of Spike’s approach across the Dig series. He has spoken of faces as the place where the eye
lingers longest: “Often, I find them even when they are not there.” The act of
softening or partly erasing the face is, for him, a device of distance, of
voyeurism, of respecting the privacy of figures who are “portraits of people
close to my heart, intentionally or otherwise.” The Icarus of this painting is
not anonymous — he is intimate, known, beloved — but he is also withheld,
glimpsed rather than possessed. That quality of restraint, of the painting
holding something back while offering so much, is precisely what makes it
linger.

Icarus’ Wheel in the Context of Spike’s Practice

Harry Spike (b. c. 1996, Peak District, United Kingdom) completed his BFA
in painting and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art — one of Europe’s most
internationally recognised fine art institutions, with a graduate tradition
that has produced generations of important British painters — and subsequently
continued his studies at the Royal Drawing School in London, the postgraduate
programme founded by HM King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and artist
Catherine Goodman, known for its rigorous commitment to observational drawing.
The combination of these two institutions is formative in a specific way: the
Glasgow School’s tradition of painterly ambition and the Royal Drawing School’s
emphasis on draughtsmanship produce precisely the kind of technical
groundedness that is visible in Icarus’ Wheel— a painting that is loose and atmospheric in feeling
but built on a secure structural foundation.

His paintings draw from Neoclassical and Renaissance sources with genuine
authority rather than mere quotation. Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection was a touchstone for the Dig exhibition - Spike has described Piero as “someone who has always guided me when I’ve needed
help with a composition.” The influence is visible in the monumental placement
of the central figure, in the layered spatial recession from near to far, and
in the way the painting holds stillness and atmosphere simultaneously. What
Spike brings to this classical inheritance is a contemporary queer
subjectivity: the figures are male, the desires depicted are his own, the
landscapes are those of his Peak District childhood rendered through both
memory and feeling. As he has put it: “Something shifted this year, and the
backgrounds became familiar. The figures now exist in a landscape that is close
to my heart, the place where I grew up and first made sense of the world.”

The Dig exhibition, Spike’s debut solo at Cob Gallery, was received
with immediate critical attention. Dazed featured the show, describing its
depictions of “stolen kisses, nascent desires and loves lost.” Artsy placed Icarus’
Wheel as the central image in its February 2026 “5 Artists on Our Radar”
selection — among the most significant editorial acts of visibility an emerging
painter can receive, reaching Artsy’s global collector and institutional
audience at the precise moment of the artist’s debut.

The Case for Acquiring Icarus’ Wheel for the Black
Square Collection

Harry Spike is among the most compelling British painters of his
generation to have emerged in the last twelve months. He is thirty years old,
trained at two of the United Kingdom’s most respected institutions, and working
within a figurative tradition — queer subjectivity, mythological reference,
landscape-as-psychological-space — that is at the centre of the most important
conversations in contemporary painting today. His work has been collected by
the Royal Collection, the institution responsible for one of the largest and
most significant art collections in the world, and has been exhibited at
Christie’s in London and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. These are not
incidental details: they speak to the speed and seriousness with which his
practice has already been recognised at an institutional level.

He is represented by Cob Gallery in London — a gallery with a carefully
curated roster of emerging artists and a strong track record of identifying
talent early, ranked #9 out of 500 in Artfacts’ Discoveries ranking, a metric
that identifies the galleries most consistently breaking artists of long-term
significance at the earliest stage of their careers. This is a gallery that
collects its artists with deliberateness, and Spike is its lead proposition.

Icarus’ Wheel is the highlight work of Dig, Spike’s debut
solo exhibition — the work that Artsy chose to illustrate its editorial, the
work that anchors the show’s thematic and mythological ambition. It is the
largest and most resolved statement of the series: a painting that holds
together Renaissance compositional thinking, a bold personal chromatic
language, queer intimacy, and a retelling of one of Western culture’s most
resonant myths. These are durable qualities. They do not depend on fashion.
They are the qualities that institutional collections — and the collectors who
think over decades rather than cycles — act on.

For Black Square, which has acquired the work at the earliest possible
moment in a career that is already attracting the attention of the Royal
Collection, Christie’s, and Artsy’s global editorial, this acquisition
positions the collection precisely where it should be: ahead of the wider
market, acquiring from artists of genuine long-term potential while the work is
still available at entry-level pricing. The upside is significant. The risk is
low. The painting is exceptional.

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Artsy
Editorial. “5 Artists on Our Radar in February 2026.” Artsy, 19 February 2026.

Dazed.
“Harry Spike, Dig.” Dazed, February 2026.

Dazed.
“These paintings reimagine historical masterpieces through a queer lens.”
Dazed, February 2026.

Cob
Gallery. Harry Spike: Dig. Exhibition, Cob Gallery, London, 2026.