“Obsessed by images of humanity on the very edge of disintegration, Tom de Freston is audacious enough to convey our most haunted fears about a world struggling for survival in the twenty-first century.”
Richard Cork, August 2011

Creating stages for sinister players, Tom de Freston orchestrates violent spectacles undermined by the absurdity of the participating cast. Recent works have drawn on the themes and work of William Shakespeare. The complicated tragedy of the human condition witnessed in King Lear, the fanciful confusion and absurdity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the murderous Macbeth greatly inform the works chosen for the artist’s first solo exhibition with BREESE LITTLE.

Since completing both a BA in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University (2005) and an MA in History of Art at the University of Cambridge (2007), de Freston has worked tirelessly to populate an idiosyncratic iconography of raging demons which run riot across his canvases. Grotesque and dehumanised acts of malevolence are portrayed with a vivid and colourful style that seems endlessly at odds with the image it constructs. De Freston revels in the illusionistic possibilities of paint, cavorting through artistic, literary and theatrical sources summoning dark visions of humanity.