For Josh Lilley’s inaugural presentation at Frieze Seoul, the gallery will exhibit a new body of work by vanguard British painter Tom Anholt (b. 1987, Bath, UK). A scholar-stylist for contemporary figurative painting, Anholt’s protagonists journey through liminal landscapes under cover of darkness, traversing somewhere between the exotic and the everyday. Through rich, sublime palettes Anholt summons the moon or dawn lit skies and the watery crossings which guide their path; a diver swimming through an ever connecting labyrinth to which there is no apparent end. It is this futile search for perfection; the act of noble failure which can offer a path to enlightenment, which fascinates Anholt. His modern-day fables tell of our perpetual and vital desire for wonderment, in amongst the minutiae of modern life.

Surveying a vast history of pictorial strategy, Anholt channels past masters and formalist technique whilst resisting singularity, to identify the evolution of painting’s own language. The result is spaces of timeless and far-reaching yonder, at once renderings of natural wilderness and the internal mapping of an artist’s imagination.

Anholt describes his painting practice as a spiralling journey: “huge loops that suck in 5,000 years of art history and rotate back to today.” Calling to both peers and progenitors within the canon of British painting, amongst a larger chorus of actors including the Renaissance and Romanticist masters, Anholt’s paintings are topographical plains of artistic endeavour. The compositional intricacies of Chris Ofili and Peter Doig are distilled amongst the sweeping sublime forces channelled by Thomas Cole, the pensive mountainscapes of Marsden Hartley emerge in stark contrast to the inhospitable cliffs which recall the perspectival experiments of Max Beckmann.

And amongst the canonical rhetoric, Anholt makes space for the great in-between, vast romantic landscapes where rules are broken and conventions upturned. Here, figures are rendered obliquely, subsumed into the landscape, or otherwise conspicuous in their absence – giving way to natural form. A watery cave flattens the depth of field as our gaze reaches for a distant midnight swimmer, dwarfed by exaggerated rocky forms. Fluctuating between a sense of deep isolation and romanticism, aglow with an ethereal presence, Anholt reflects too on the artist-persona and the constant pursuit to capture life.

Each landscape painting is contrasted by a series of intimate and more detail-oriented flower paintings, each of which recall centuries of painterly tradition. This alternating scale and focus distill Anholt’s exploratory practice, as the viewer journeys with the work through the quiet recesses of a painter’s mind.