Tomas Spicer
Tomas Spicer
b. 1988, London, UK
Lives and works in London, UK
Biography
Tomas Spicer (b. 1988, London, UK) studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2010) and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2025). He completed a PGCE at the Institute of Education, University College London (2021). Spicer has contributed to various educational programmes as a visiting artist and tutor. His practice investigates the material and conceptual possibilities of painting, drawing, and mark-making, exploring themes of biography, memory, and alternative literacies. Recent exhibitions include Language Constructs (Asquith Gibbs Building, London, 2025), Freedom Verses (House Work Presents, London, 2024), Low Level Readers (Asquith Gibbs Building, London, 2024), Propositions (Asquith Gibbs Building, London, 2024), Prologue (Des Bains, London, 2023), A Rip In The Sky (Koppel Project, London 2020), 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), the exhibition text Freedom Verses (House Work Presents, London, 2024), the gallery publication Year Book: Bodies, Places, Fragments (Instituto, Porto, 2020), and the artist book Night School (20 Feet South, England, 2020). Spicer has initiated and co-directed artist-run spaces in London (LEM Gallery London, 2010-2015) and is currently the co-director of House Work Presents (2024-ongoing) an artist-run gallery and residency programme operating out of the artist home in East London.
Artist Statement
I am a London-based artist working primarily in painting and drawing. My practice explores mark-making as a language in its own right—an embodied, affective mode of communication shaped by biography, memory, and alternative literacies. Using materials such as crayon, pencil, oil paint, pastel, and handmade cotton rag paper, I create layered abstractions that resist fixed meaning. My surfaces emerge through cycles of inscription, erasure, and reconfiguration, often framed and installed in ways that foreground process, temporality, and viewer interaction.
My research investigates painting as a dialogical and haptic language—one that operates at the edge of conventional legibility and opens onto the space of learning, not-knowing, and embodied thought. Drawing on my own early struggles with literacy, I approach painting not as representation, but as a way of making sense: a visual grammar developed through touch, rhythm, and emotional charge. My practice is deeply informed by pedagogical and spatial concerns, shaped by my experience as a parent, educator, and former student navigating institutional spaces from the margins.
My work engages themes of access, power, and the politics of display, often reimagining where and how painting might be encountered. Installations may include sculptural or architectural interventions—building materials, spray painted surfaces, or low to the ground presentation—signaling constraints and possibilities inherent in systems of learning and visibility. My compositions oscillate between rawness and restraint, drawing on repetition, tempo, and variation to create visual environments that feel both intimate and charged. Childhood materials, early educational atmospheres, and urban sensory memory underpin my palette and vocabulary, imbuing abstraction with a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and care. Rather than seeking resolution, my paintings hold contradiction. They speak in fragments—at once open and coded, gestural and structured, autobiographical and affective.
My diptychs and framed sequences operate as visual sentences, forming a modular, reconfigurable language that unfolds across time and space. In this way, my work proposes a form of abstraction that is not about escaping meaning, but about holding space for multiple readings, relational tensions, and quiet acts of resistance.
Education
2021-2025 - MFA, Goldsmiths, UOL, London, UK
2019-2020 - PGCE, Institute of Education, UCL, London, UK
2010-2014 - BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, UAL, London, UK
Selected exhibitions
2025 - The Many Joys of Language, Goldsmiths MFA Degree Show, London, UK
2025 - 100 Languages, Open Studio, MFA Studios Asquith Gibbs Building, London, UK
2025 - Language Construct, MFA Studios Asquith Gibbs Building, London, UK
2024 - Freedom Verses, House Work, London, UK
2024 - Low Level Readers, MFA Studios Asquith Gibbs Building, London, UK
2024 - Propositions, MFA Studios Asquith Gibbs Building, London, UK
2024 - O.S.D 1, MFA Studios Asquith Gibbs Building, London, UK
2023 - Prologue, Des Bains, London, UK
2022 - Career Break (Parental Leave)
2021 - A Rip In the Sky, The Koppel Project, London, UK
2020 - Walking Lines, Instituto, Porto, PT
Associated projects
2025 - 100 Languages, Artist-led workshop, Ann Taylor Children and Family Hub, Hackney, London, UK
2024-Ongoing - Co-director House Work Presents, Artist-run gallery, London, UK
Collections
Tomas Spicer features in private collections in England, Portugal, France, Spain, America, and India.
Selected publication
Art Place, The Next Generation: Class of 2025 (article). London: Art Place, 2025.
Tomas Spicer, The Many Joys of Language, (press release). London: Goldsmiths University of London, 2025.
Tomas Spicer, 100 Languages, Open Studio, (press release). London: MFA Studios, 2024.
Tomas Spicer, Freedom Verses (press release). London: House Work Presents, 2024.
Read PDF
Instituto, Year Book, Bodies, Places, Fragments (gallery publication). Porto: Instituto, 2020.
Artist portrait
Goldsmiths MFA Studio 2025
Image taken by Bliver
