CONSUMED (Swallow the Sky)

Consumed explores the sensation of being completely enveloped by your surroundings: lost in desire, absorbed by nature, or staring at the sky until the distinction between yourself and your surroundings begins to collapse. Hjelm's paintings occupy the space between intimacy and vastness, where the self becomes both intensely present and almost absent.

The imagery draws directly from archival call cards, the small advertisements once found in London telephone booths that promised connection, pleasure, and escape in a single glance. Hjelm strips these images of their original context, isolating their emotional charge: figures caught in states of ecstasy, eyes closed, mouths open in surrender. Desire is present, but its object is withheld. The space between anticipation and release becomes central to the exhibition.

That tension is set against recurring motifs of the sky and the sea: vast, borderless, and constant. Where the figures strain towards contact, the sky offers another form of surrender — one without an object of desire, where the self simply dissipates. Across the exhibition, sea and clouds, body and atmosphere begin to merge, until the distinction between figure and environment becomes increasingly unstable.

The show's emotional register draws on the Romantic sublime and Nietzsche's reading of intensity and surrender as forms of vitality rather than loss of control. Together, they frame surrender as an active act of release: a willingness to let go of the need to interpret, possess, or control an experience while it is happening. Hjelm builds this language from an archive of call cards, pages from Playgirl magazine, self-portraits, and photographs of the sky. Reworked, layered and abraded, these images become fragments of memory, suspended between recognition and disappearance.

Technically, the exhibition marks a significant shift in Hjelm's practice. This year, he has moved towards a more flattened surface, moving away from the physical layering, tearing and reconstruction that defined the depth of his earlier work. In Consumed, depth is instead created through the accumulation, repetition and manipulation of imagery. The result is a more distilled technical language, where physical intervention gives way to the gradual erosion and transformation of the image over time.

About the Artist

Thomas Hjelm (b. 1992) is a half-Swedish, London-born and London-raised artist whose structural artworks combine Painting and Print. Highly commended for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize, Hjelm exhibited and curated at Saatchi Gallery's London Grads Now in 2021 and was selected as one of Saatchi Art's Global Rising Stars in 2022. He continues to build on his contribution to the London art scene through HBH Gallery, the collaborative gallery he co-founded, which champions emerging and mid-career talent. He completed a Foundation and BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, followed by a Master's degree at the Royal College of Art.

Hjelm's practice is concerned with what survives when an image is subjected to time, repetition, and material pressure. Working from a personal archive shaped by his experience of growing up in London, alongside commercial print, urban ephemera, and weathered advertisements, he treats this imagery as a language of his own, continually reworked rather than simply referenced. Through repeated abrasion, layering and reconstruction, images break down and reform, leaving behind a trace carried by memory beyond the original image.

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