Tom Faber
Tom Faber
Composition After Saint Anthony, 2018
Pigment print on Epson semi-gloss paper
100 x 135 cm
Edition of 5 + 2AP
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About this Work
Composition After Saint Anthony is a collage with digital brushstrokes constructed from scans of cardboard cups in which the artist washed paintbrushes. It is also a digital reinvention of The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487-88) by Michelangelo, itself a copy of Martin Schongauer’s engraving Temptation of St. Anthony.
The common thread, aside from the more immediate religious narration, is the clash between humans and nature, virtues and temptations. Re-working an old image into a contemporary medium, Faber recycled away the figures to describe a state of change.
Maintaining the original colour-scheme and the composition almost intact, the artist abstracted the figures to test the possibilities of gesture in this space. Faber tore bodies apart, imagining the strain on marks as they move further away from their materials. What is left is the surreal vision of how an organic being might look like in a computerized, post human world.
About Tom Faber
Faber’s work focuses on memory, place, and transformation. He produces both videos and digitally printed images, using a blend of techniques from drawing, painting, collage and 3D animation. Faber works with a library of scans, consisting of detritus from his studio and from the ground: paint marks, soil, and drawings. With these materials, he develops a language of distortive mark-making and plays with the possibilities of digital gesture. Converting these sources allows him to explore the assertive, faulty generations of memory, and the resonances of virtual 'world-building’ at a time of environmental damage. Within this framework, he degrades and recycles images. Producing scenes which often have a harmonious surface, these works tend towards the lush escapism of popular animation, but collapse under the effects of weather. Faber’s image-making techniques point towards the natural world, but hover and stall in anxiety and escapism. They find ways of weathering material into a state of erasure, simulating threats to vast and intimate systems.
Education
2017-18 Chelsea College of Arts – Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts (Distinction)
2012-15 University of Cambridge – BA (Hons) History of Art
Awards & Commissions
2019
Winterreise, digital set design for an audio-visual staging of Schubert’s song cycle
Exceptional Graduate Award, Collyer Bristow Gallery (shortlisted)
Glyndebourne Tour Art Competition winner
Residencies
2019
‘United’, UK Young Artists and Platform Nord, Leicester, UK, and Kristiansand, Norway
Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway
Exhibitions
2019
Quarry, Ionion Centre for the Arts and Culture, Kefalonia (solo show)
Exceptional, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London
2018
SEA(S) 2018, Ionion Centre for The Arts and Culture, Kefalonia
A Manifesto of Ecology, Phoenix Gallery, Athens
Three, HartsLane, London
Offsite, Safe House, London
One, Chelsea College of Arts, London
Snorkel, The Cookhouse, London