Tommy Harrison: Commonplace
In 2025, the Iris Art Museum, Suzhou (CN), will present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Tommy Harrison. Attuned to the historical and classical foundations of painting, Harrison continues to explore his interest in religious and cultural iconography, alongside elements drawn from his immediate surroundings, imbuing overlapping compositions with motifs and carefully composed textures; for him, moments severed from their referent begin to produce a visual intensity of the peculiar.
These new paintings pivot around the theme of the confessional, the enclosed stall in a church divided by a screen or curtain in which a priest sits to hear confessions. The subjects attempting to confess and speak in his compositions are often rendered mute – fragmented masks and mannequins with heads obscured or missing. In Harrison’s depictions of these, a microphone is also often present, playing with the threshold between public and private to suggest that these intimate conversations are recorded or broadcast. These thresholds are often physical too – shutters, boarded up doors and windows and industrial metal cages – offering a suggestion of once being transparent but now rendered stripped of their function, obfuscating dead-ends. Often, by being life-size too, both the figures and these architectural features, the viewer is confronted with being implicated in the mise-en-scène.
Harrison gives weight to these commonplace objects and locations through their considered combination with other motifs, instituting a code of gestures which have no definite symbolic meaning from the outset. Rather, meaning is derived through a change of contexts and their experimental groupings. Indeed, throughout Harrison’s work, there is this sense of dissonance, the result being an atmosphere of suspense and mystery.
The Iris Art Museum is located on the picturesque shore of Jinji Lake, with a total construction area of approximately 2,000 square meters. It is dedicated to promoting and popularising modern and contemporary art, with a special focus on supporting young and emerging artists.
A new GRIMM publication on Harrison will accompany the exhibition.
About the Artist
Tommy Harrison (b. 1996, Stockport, UK) graduated with an MFA in painting at the Manchester School of Art (2021-23), for which he received in 2020 the Haworth Trust Painting Scholarship. Solo exhibitions include Displays, GRIMM, London (UK); Double Bind, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in 2024; Tone Cluster, GRIMM, New York, NY (US) in 2023 and Frozen Mid-Melt, Pipeline Contemporary, London (UK) in 2022. Harrison's work has been included in group exhibitions at Huxley-Parlour, London (UK); Chapelle de l'Humanité, Paris (FR); Islington Mill, Salford (UK); Elysium Gallery, Swansea (UK) where he was shortlisted for the Beep International Painting Prize; Bankley Gallery, Manchester (UK); and Holden Gallery, Manchester (UK).
