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Tom de Freston at The Bow-Wow Shop (Orpheus Special)

By September 1, 2016September 5th, 2016No Comments

Tom de Freston’s Orpheus prints will be exhibited at Omnibus during the Bow-Wow Shop on Orpheus on Monday 5th September, starting at 7:30pm. Tom is one of Michael Glover’s guests exhibiting works around the theme of Orpheus. He is currently working on a graphic novel surrounding the same theme.

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Tom’s work often starts with a loaded source. In the past this has included paintings by Goya and Picasso, Shakespearian tragedies, Spencer’s ‘The Faerie Queene’, Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Western presentations of conflict. He states that his “projects are often the result of cross-disciplinary collaborations with poets, academics, animators, filmmakers, musicians and theatre directors. In each case the collaboration is centered upon exploring the possibilities present in the source material, and how the conversations between the different media might generate a further engagement and expansion of the material.” This will be the case during the Bow-Wow Shop, when participants such as economist journalist Ann Wroe, who recently wrote a book on the Orpheus myth, poet Marius Kociejowski; Martyn Crucefix, who will be reading from his translations of Rilke’s sonnets to Orpheus; and Lita Manners and Paul Thomas, who have composed music around the theme.

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Tom de Freston is currently Cultural Fellow at University of Birmingham at Artistic Director at the Wellcome Trust funded Medicine Unboxed. Previous positions include Leverhulme Artist in Residence (Cambridge University) and Levy Plumb Artist in Residence (Christ’s College). Tom has had a long list of solo shows including at The Globe Theatre, The Other Place (RSC), Breese Little Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, the Bodleian Library, Battersea Arts Centre and the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (Tokyo).

He has received major funding awards from the AHRC, Oxford University and Arts Council England. He has had four books published on his work and another four of his own books published, two of which received Saboteur Awards. His upcoming graphic fiction is being published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Upcoming exhibitions and events include Stowe (the National Trust), Mount Stuart (Bute) and the Ashmolean Museum.

 

Praise for Tom de Freston’s works:

“They inspire in the reader/viewer the same sense of disquiet and dread and awe -because there is a beauty too. It’s like you’ve both breathed in his darkness and made it your own”Sir Anthony Sher on House of the Deaf Man.

“The installation of de Freston work creates a harmonious celebration in a Chapel where art, architecture, prayer and music come together to provide a deeply moving spiritual experience.” Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate

“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, Art Critic

“I get exactly that feeling of bleak despair from Tom’s harrowing Lear paintings, powerful to encounter and difficult to live with.” Sir Trevor Nunn

“Tom de Freston has produced something quite unlike any book I have seen before. The pictures are disturbing, the poems challenging. There is a prodigal richness of talent allied to a tumultuously anarchic vision that demands – and finds – a quite new way of expressing itself.” Professor John Carey- literary critic for the Sunday Times.7gc

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