Thomas Hjelm is a London-based artist whose work examines what persists as images are subjected to time, repetition, and material pressure. Imagery drawn from commercial print and urban ephemera—rooted in a personal archive shaped by the artist’s experience of growing up in London—recurs within the work as a closed language, continually reworked rather than observed. Through abrasion and repetition, images break down and reform. The work sits between two conditions: the endless circulation of images online and the fading traces of a recent physical past. Figures persist only in fragments, caught between presence and disappearance. What remains is not a fixed image, but a trace—something carried by memory beyond both the image and the act of painting. The paintings remain in motion, reflecting our own shifting experience.

 

The imagery is drawn to themes of desire, hope, and escapism, carried into the work as part of its internal language, continually reworked and in progress, rather than held as reference.