Josh Lilley to open Icarus on Monday, February 13th in Los Angeles during the week Frieze Los Angeles and Felix Art Fair open, the largest painting to date and a dedicated off-site project by British painter Tom Anholt. The work follows the artist’s significant presentation at Art Basel Miami: Meridians in 2022.
Situated in an off-site space in Culver City four floors above the ground, the 20 foot painting will fly over the city’s skyline. Referencing the ancient greek myth of Icarus, who upon escape from imprisonment using wings made of feathers, thread and beeswax, flew too close to the sun and burned, Anholt draws an analogy between Icarus and his own complex relationship with the artist’s ascendancy – a position underpinned by subjective logic and volatility. Anholt says “I’ve always liked the fact that as an artist you have the right to say something with total commitment one day, and fail, and crash, and change your mind the next”.Anholt describes the painterly process as a fallible but beautiful journey in which failure is integral to reaching new heights. This new painting is a testament to the artist’s perpetual desire to reinvent and reimagine, and the precarity which that engenders.
Josh Lilley presents Tom Anholt, Icarus, Art Opening, Monday 13th February, 6 – 8pm Exhibition continues 13th – 19th February 2023, 5788 W Adams Blvd, Culver City, Los Angeles
About the artist
Tom Anholt (b. 1987, Bath, UK) is a scholar-stylist for today’s figurative painting. Anholt combs a galaxy of pictorial strategies to conjure a place both exotic and everyday, filtering modern life through a lens of art history, optical effects and florid allegory. In addition to 2018 and 2020 exhibitions at Josh Lilley, Anholt has been the subject of solo exhibitions at EIGEN + ART, Berlin and Leipzig; Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul; and Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen. The artist featured in the 2018 recent-painting survey KNOWN/UNKNOWNS at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Tom Anholt lives and works in Berlin.
