p o í ē s i s Tom de Freston Varvara Roza Galleries 8 Duke Street St James’s London, SW1W 6BN 03.12.2025-20.12.2025 Private View: 3rd December, 6:30–9pm curated by vassiliki tzanakou
Poíēsis is a major solo exhibition by British artist Tom de Freston at Varvara Roza Galleries. Curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou, the exhibition presents a technically ambitious and visually stunning new body of paintings that explore love, grief, mythology, and the unstable boundary between personal and archetypal experience.
Poíēsis derives from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, which means ‘to make’, ‘to create’. It refers to the act of bringing into existence something that did not previously exist. It encompasses a cognitive operation, involving intuition and imagination, and a generative force within both the self and the world.
For over sixteen years, de Freston has painted his wife, the award-winning novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, in a variety of literary and mythological guises; Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Eurydice. These portraits are often part of the couple’s rich multimedia collaborations, spanning books, films, graphic novels, and immersive performances.
Poíēsis emerged from a deeply personal journey. Following Millwood Hargrave’s pregnancy loss in 2020 and six subsequent miscarriages the couple eventually welcomed their daughter in 2023. These artworks, at once mythic and raw, are elegies and odes to the grief of losing a child, the resilience of love, and the wonder of parenthood. In an exquisite, dreamlike palette, the paintings evoke the body and mind in transition; pregnant, abstracted, dissolving into surfaces and re-emerging from hidden underworlds.
De Freston stages his figures within shifting spaces, architectural grids, natural landscapes and intimate interiors where they hover between visibility and vanishing. Shadows, footprints, and outstretched hands interrupt the scenes, evoking the gaze of both artist and viewer, whilst exploring the dynamics of both distance and empathy. These spaces are psychological hinterlands, invitations to the viewer to enter sacred areas that are always just beyond reach. They are born from a journey through loss and grief but ultimately speak to hope and wonder.
The paintings are in dialogue with de Freston’s acclaimed narrative non-fiction book, Strange Bodies (Granta, 2023), a lyrical blend of memoir, art criticism, and studio reflections. The book traces artistic dialogues with figures such as Francis Bacon, Jadé Fadojutimi, and most notably Titian, whose poesie paintings form a central inspiration. Like Titian, de Freston weaves painting and poetry together, with fragments of Millwood Hargrave’s Eurydice poems, originally composed as part of their multimedia retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice (2014–16), which now echo uncannily through their lived experience.
