Tomas Harker - Metaphoric Medicine, 2025

There is something unsettling about the world Tomas Harker paints — not
because it is alien, but because it is almost familiar. A young British painter
of rare instinct, Harker works at the precise fault line where the contemporary
image economy meets the untouched natural world, and what emerges from that
collision is neither comfortable nor easily forgotten.

Metaphoric Medicine belongs to his series Third Nature, a
body of work that confronts what Harker calls the overlooked surrealism of
contemporary life. His paintings begin as collages — film stills, art history,
iPhone photographs, social media fragments — sources chosen not arbitrarily but
for their metaphorical tension, their conflicting symbolic registers, the
friction between what they show and what they mean. Painting, for Harker, is a
deliberate slowing down. In an era of hyperreal image saturation, he interrupts
the scroll and asks us to look again, longer, differently.

Metaphoric Medicine draws its central imagery from Baz Luhrmann’s The
Great Gatsby — the DiCaprio iteration, drenched in spectacle and excess, a
film that is itself a meditation on illusion and the dangerous seduction of
belief. The liquid at the painting’s core is rendered physically transparent,
under-lit by the raw white of the gesso primer beneath — a material honesty
that paradoxically deepens the illusion. The frogs, rendered in the register of
symbolic illustration, exist in an in-between state: neither fully real nor
fully sign, suspended in the same liminal condition the painting itself
inhabits.

The Gatsby source material is one Harker has continued to mine across
subsequent bodies of work — a testament to how much he finds in it. In her
essay “The Wild World’s Face,” written for Harker’s 2025 solo exhibition
Sherwood Forest at The Sunday Painter, the critic Philippa Snow engages at
length with a later painting drawing from the same film. Her observations
illuminate the logic at work in Metaphoric Medicine as much as in that
subsequent piece: Harker takes the glittering spectacle of a Hollywood icon and
bleaches it into something deathly and symbolic — an act that condenses an
entire arc of rise and ruin into a single suspended image, operating like those
photographs that layer every frame of a film into one frantic blur, until all
that remains is a glow, or a mood. That Snow — one of the most rigorous critics
writing in English today, whose work appears in Artforum, frieze, and 4Columns
— chose to engage so seriously with this strand of Harker’s practice speaks to
its sustained intellectual coherence across series.

This layering of slippage is the structural logic of Harker’s entire
practice. He does not sample from visual culture; he metabolises it. The
painting operates through the distillation of complex, loaded material into
pure atmosphere and unease — and what emerges is less a borrowed image than a
new and troubling object.

This is the territory Harker is mapping — what he describes as the
grotesque at the margins, that uneasy threshold where one belief system begins
to fray and another has not yet solidified. He draws a striking analogy to
chaos magic, the esoteric practice in which belief alone is sufficient to
reshape reality. We are, he suggests, living through exactly such a moment: a
civilisational slippage, a closing loop between the virtual and the real, each
now hyperbolicising the other in an accelerating feedback. Paint, with its
ancient art-historical language, becomes the unlikely instrument for describing
this condition. States of perception — illusion, transparency, slippage — are
not merely depicted but enacted through the materiality of the medium itself.
The work does not tell you what to think. It resists the didactic. It invites
instead a non-linear reading, a subjective encounter with meaning in conditions
of increasingly mediated experience.

The Case for Acquiring Metaphoric Medicine for the
Black Square Collection

The decision to acquire Metaphoric Medicine is grounded in both
intellectual conviction and market evidence — and the two are unusually well
aligned in Harker’s case.

Conceptually, the work is precisely the kind of painting that earns its
place in a serious collection over time. It engages, without didacticism, with
questions that define our cultural moment: the erosion of stable meaning, the
feedback loop between the virtual and the real, the return of the grotesque as
a symptom of civilisational transition. These are not fashionable concerns —
they are structural ones. Paintings that address them with genuine rigour and
formal intelligence tend to age exceptionally well.

The market signals reinforce this case at every level. Harker was awarded
the 2018 Ingram Collection Purchase Prize — one of the most respected
acquisition prizes for emerging British artists — and was selected for
Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2021, the programme widely regarded as the most
significant platform for identifying new British talent, with a track record of
launching careers that go on to define their generation. He holds an MA in
Painting from the Royal College of Art, the most competitive postgraduate
painting programme in the United Kingdom.

He is represented by Nicodim Gallery — a Los Angeles-born institution
with a proven record as one of the art world’s most consequential incubators of
emerging talent, and itself ranked #16 out of 200 on Artifacts’ global Discover
index, a metric that aggregates institutional activity and critical visibility
to identify the galleries operating at the sharpest edge of the market. Founded
by Mihai Nicodim in 2006, the gallery was the first to present artists
including Adrian Ghenie, Dominique Fung, Moffat Takadiwa, and Katherina
Olschbaur in major solo exhibitions stateside — placing their works in
important private and public collections and helping their careers blossom into
global prominence. To be on Nicodim’s roster is to occupy a very specific and
historically validated position in the market’s emerging tier. The gallery now
operates across Los Angeles, New York, and Bucharest, and participates
regularly in Art Basel. In London, Harker is represented by The Sunday Painter,
one of the most carefully curated and critically respected galleries in the
British capital, and has shown with Workplace Gallery, Guts Gallery, and
Tatjana Pieters in Ghent.

His exhibition history has expanded rapidly and with intention. In 2026,
he was selected for a group show at Nicodim’s New York space alongside Emily
Ferguson and Sol Kordich — a programme that signals sustained gallery
investment in his transatlantic trajectory. He has also been selected for a
group show at Olney Gleason in New York — a gallery of exceptional pedigree,
formerly operating as Kasmin, and currently representing the estates of Jackson
Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Robert Indiana — a context that places Harker in
direct dialogue with the canonical history of American painting. Galleries of
that lineage curate their group shows with extreme deliberateness; inclusion is
an endorsement.

The critical infrastructure around his work is equally strong. His most
recent solo exhibition Sherwood Forest at The Sunday Painter attracted an essay
by Philippa Snow — one of the most rigorous and widely published art critics
writing in English today. Snow’s sustained engagement with Harker’s practice,
and specifically with his use of the Gatsby source material that also underpins
Metaphoric Medicine, is a meaningful signal of the seriousness with which the
critical establishment is beginning to receive his work.

Taken together — the intellectual depth of the practice, the quality of
institutional validation on both sides of the Atlantic, the strength of gallery
representation, the acceleration of his exhibition programme, the calibre of
his critical interlocutors, and the specificity of his market positioning —
Metaphoric Medicine presents a compelling case. It is the kind of work that
Black Square acquires not only because it belongs in the collection
intellectually, but because it will matter more, not less, as Harker’s career
continues to develop.

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