Tommy Harrison

Commonplace

November 17, 2025 – January 13, 2026

Iris Art Museum, Suzhou (CN)

The Iris Art Museum, Suzhou (CN) presents a solo exhibition of Tommy Harrison's works, featuring a new body of paintings that mark a shift towards the personal in his practice.

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.

The exhibition will open during Shanghai Art Week this November, accompanied by a new GRIMM publication on Harrison's work.

Making direct reference to the specificities of his studio, the works locate it as a site for further investigation, exploring the visual tensions between narrative and form. Attuned to the historical and classical foundations of painting, Harrison continues to explore his interest in religious and cultural iconography, 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.

The shutters feature in all of these new paintings, dragged down to reveal or obscure to differing degrees, each rolled segment carefully considered within a series of classical ratios. Sometimes they are ever so slightly askew, summoning the creaky sound of a malfunctioning motor or a frustrated hand wrestling with the slats. The rectangular forms of the shutter and its contents are reduced to ratios of space and mass, allowing intuitive decisions made across the canvas to find their certainty.

Behind these shutters lie a number of scenarios and narratives, each of which is obfuscated by the semi-closed barriers. Motifs may be drawn from religious iconography and wider visual culture as much as they may from Harrison’s immediate surroundings – one can find both an unplumbed toilet sinking into broken floorboards and a headless Christ on the cross amongst a pile of rubble. In Display II, a floating veil of Veronica and delicately rendered hand, as though taken straight from a classical composition, stretch out from a clatter of timbers and metal poles, as though the victim of an accident.

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,
please email: enquiry@grimmgallery.com