Endless Romance Forever explores the unstable relationship between image, desire, and belief. Across the exhibition and through motifs of shining gold, refracting glass, and masks, the paintings examine how surfaces seduce, conceal, and acquire meaning, as the familiar begins to come undone.
The paintings inhabit the uneasy space where attraction and unease become inseparable. They invite and deter, reflecting the ambivalence of the meanings we construct through images and the values ascribed through the symbolic order that continually shapes our changing reality. Beneath their seductive surfaces, unstable inner worlds and undercurrents of desire remain permeable and in constant motion.
Harker’s world is governed by stories and expectations, and the works participate in the exhibition's larger unraveling of certainty: what appears enchanting may conceal something less easily understood. In The Cherry Tree, the familiar is transformed through repetition, memory, and artifice. Elsewhere, this instability takes on a more fractured dimension, recalling the moment when an image, narrative, or belief can no longer maintain its coherence. Nosferalgia introduces a darker temporal undercurrent. Its title suggests a longing for something uncanny and difficult to recover, bringing together desire, memory, and the persistence of images that refuse to disappear. Like an afterimage that remains after the source has vanished, the work speaks to the exhibition's fascination with what lingers beneath or beyond the visible. Together, the works reflect the exhibition's interest in the fragile structures through which we make sense of what we see.
The exhibition unfolds according to the dream logic of cinema and image proliferation: hidden forces gather behind the veil, the glow of projection, the persistence of the afterimage, the image that punctures.
Endless Romance Forever is Harker’s second solo exhibition with Nicodim and his first in New York.
Tomas Harker (b.1990, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. His works addresses the nature of meaning in conditions of mediated experience and hyperreal saturation. Harker’s practice often draws from a variety of image production and distribution systems in an attempt to make sense of a cosmic order becoming increasingly disordered. His paintings reflect the increasing murkiness and confusion of contemporary life, whilst remaining mindful of the dynamics of power benefiting from uncertainty. Exhibitions include Endless Romance Forever, Nicodim, New York (2026, solo, forthcoming); Emily Ferguson / Tomas Harker / Sol Kordich, Nicodim, New York (2026); Sherwood Forest, The Sunday Painter, London (2025, solo); Painting, Photography, Painting, Olney Gleason, New York (2026); Remain in Light: Tomas Harker, Laurent Proux, Robert Yarber, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2025); The Lightness of Being, Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles (2024, solo); Multiple Choice Fairytale Ending, The Sunday Painter, London (2023, solo); New Ancients, Guts Gallery, London (2023); The Artist is Present, Guts Gallery, London (2022); Apotrope, CobGallery, London (2022); I haven’t been Sleeping, Screw Gallery, Leeds (2021, solo); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2021); Third Nature, Copeland Gallery, London (2021, solo); A Sea in Suspense, Bo.lee Gallery, London (2019, solo); There’s something about Painting, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (2019); Cite, Bo.lee Gallery, London (2018); and Syzygy, Leeds Arts University, Leeds (2018).