Within Tomas Harker's practice, the gesture of painting has a function akin to self-analysis. Insights are unveiled and decoded both over the course of creation and during subsequent encounters with the viewer. The brevity of Harker's brushstrokes suggest a sense of agency, responding to our consumption and the pace of visual saturation. His economy of brushstroke, characteristically chalky palette and exposure of canvas convey the artist's internalisation and transformation of found image material.
The seemingly unconnected nature of his subject matter speaks of the way he encounters and collects it via the vast chasm of social media. This boundless vacuousness of the ocean of information we are barraged with online daily obscures significance through its sheer size, blinding us with information.
Heterogeneous found contemporary imagery is appropriated and repositioned, and thus given new meaning, whilst more classical themes are explored in the inverse - by obscuring their historical and cardinal significance.
Harker recently completed a Masters degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2018 he was awarded the Ingram Collection Purchase Prize.

mpefm UNITED KINGDOM art fair press release
20 – 31 January