Tom de Freston
Tom de Freston is a British painter and author whose work merges gestural figuration with personal narrative, often born from experiences of loss and renewal. His practice spans painting, writing, and film, and is marked by a search for beauty in trauma. In Wreck (Granta, 2022), his acclaimed cycle of large-scale paintings and accompanying book, de Freston engaged with Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa to explore grief, memory, and the unstable relationship between history and the self. His collaborative documentary with Syrian intellectual Ali Souliman, blinded in a bomb blast, further underscored his commitment to art as a space of empathy, exchange, and survival.
His recent series POESIE reflects on the recurrent miscarriages experienced by his partner, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and meditates on thresholds between love and loss, presence and absence. Infused with mythological echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and laced with Kiran’s poetry, these works are at once intimate love songs and meditations on the underworld. Awards include a Leverhulme Residency at the University of Cambridge and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University.
De Freston’s practice has also been reshaped by the catastrophic fire that destroyed his studio and twelve years of work. From the ashes, he forged a new direction: a painting language that has shifted from the noise of violence toward tenderness, colour, and a liberated emotional register.
His work has been shown to international acclaim in solo exhibitions at major public institutions including the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford and Stowe House, and is held in public collections including the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (Tokyo), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Christ’s College (Cambridge), and the Museum of Classical Archaeology.
His recent series POESIE reflects on the recurrent miscarriages experienced by his partner, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and meditates on thresholds between love and loss, presence and absence. Infused with mythological echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and laced with Kiran’s poetry, these works are at once intimate love songs and meditations on the underworld. Awards include a Leverhulme Residency at the University of Cambridge and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University.
De Freston’s practice has also been reshaped by the catastrophic fire that destroyed his studio and twelve years of work. From the ashes, he forged a new direction: a painting language that has shifted from the noise of violence toward tenderness, colour, and a liberated emotional register.
His work has been shown to international acclaim in solo exhibitions at major public institutions including the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford and Stowe House, and is held in public collections including the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (Tokyo), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Christ’s College (Cambridge), and the Museum of Classical Archaeology.