Artist: Tess Tomassini

The Air Becoming No Air Becoming Air Again is Tess Tomassini’s first solo exhibition. Its title is drawn from the final line of Frank O’Hara’s poem, Three Airs, published in Lunch Poems (1964). Informed by the refined immediacy of O’Hara’s style, Tomassini applies a light touch to her interdisciplinary practice. Bringing together monoprints and bronze sculpture, the exhibition reflects on transformation, metamorphosis and becoming.

Tomassini takes an experimental approach to printmaking, pulling secondary and tertiary impressions from a monoprint to generate new images from residual ink. The technique resonates with her chosen subjects, from 1980s drag queens to the model and actress Anna Nicole Smith. Drag performers heighten feminine tropes, while Smith created her public persona in the image of Marilyn Monroe. Japanese photography of the 1960s provides a further reference point. Shōmei Tōmatsu’s surreal photograph of a woman’s head bent backwards, Untitled (1969) inspired Tomassini’s ‘No Exit’. The head and hand of the figure allude to the photograph, whilst the lower composition is an imagined extension of the original image.

Identity is interrogated as both an echo of the other and as an autonomous force. Technically and conceptually, the work examines what is lost and gained through repetition.

The artist’s sculptural practice extends these ideas. Working with sculpted forms and found materials collected over many years — toys, perfume bottles, pipes, bones, stones and shells — her assemblages are suggestive and elusive. Playfully composed, they carry a wry, almost accidental elegance.

As with her prints, Tomassini allows her sculptural compositions to reveal themselves organically. They are assembled, cast with silicone in wax, joined by other objects, then cast again in ceramic slurry— shapeshifting until arriving at a final state. The finished bronze sculptures present both as relics and new forms.

Tess Tomassini (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Since graduating from The Drawing Year in 2023, her work has been exhibited at Christie’s, London (2023), Hypha Studios, London (2024) and Studio Kura, Fukuoka, Japan (2025). She is a founding member of PLPC, a shadow puppet troupe established in 2024, with past performances at Ginny on Frederick, London (2026) and an upcoming commission at Bold Tendencies, London (2027).