Freedom Verses brings together a new body of work by Tomas Spicer that continues his exploration of painting, drawing, and material inquiry. Across a series of drawings and painted surfaces, Spicer engages the unstable textures of contemporary experience—time, sensation, and the complexity of thought—through gestural mark-making and intuitive processes. His works, made using oil paint, crayon, pencil, canvas, and cotton rag paper, are grounded in a raw physicality. With each gesture—be it a smudge, a scrawl, or an erasure—Spicer allows the work to unfold in real time, embracing shifts in form and tone with urgency and fluidity.

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At the core of the exhibition is Stormy Days (2024–), an ongoing series of dual-panel drawings that operate as visual verses. These diptychs evoke temporal atmospheres—moods in motion—through rhythmic compositions and subtle tonal interplay. Working in layers, Spicer constructs an emotive structure within each pairing, where one panel carries and responds to the other, echoing cycles of reflection and return. The format reinforces his interest in recurrence, variation, and the dialogical nature of perception.

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The title Freedom Verses speaks to Spicer’s belief in painting as an embodied, haptic language—one that exists beyond the fixity of spoken or written word. “Verse” references not only poetics and musicality, but also a spatial rhythm in composition, while “Freedom” points to the open-endedness of both material play and meaning-making. Together, the two terms suggest a practice in flux, resistant to boundaries, and committed to the vitality of process.

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Through surface, structure, and movement, Freedom Verses invites viewers into a space of resonance—a shifting, living field where thought is felt, and time is held momentarily in form.

For further information, contact House Work at info@houseworkpresents.com.

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Tomas Spicer (b. 1988, London, UK) studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2025). He completed a PGCE at the Institute of Education, University College London. Spicer has contributed to various educational programmes as a visiting artist and guest lecturer, and was co-director of LEM, an independent exhibition space in London. His practice investigates the material and conceptual possibilities of painting, drawing, and mark-making, exploring themes of sensation, time, and perception. Recent exhibitions include Freedom Verses (House Work, London, 2024), Low Level Readers, Propositions, and Language Construct (MFA Studios, London, 2024–25), and Walking Lines (Instituto, Porto, 2020). His work is held in private collections in England, Portugal, France, Spain, America, and India.

Recent publications include the artist book Volumes (Tomas Spicer Studio, London, 2025) and the exhibition text Freedom Verses (House Work Presents, London, 2024).