Tess Tomassini
b. 1996, United Kingdom
With a declarative vision shaped by far-reaching influence, Tess Tomassini explores the politics of image-making in her multi-disciplinary practice. Her work spirals across painting, printmaking, photography and performance, often involving collaborative methods. An interest in repetitive gestures - or ‘echoes’ - informs the artist’s approach to both concept and process. In her work, images are reproduced, reflected and recast, complicating their original meaning. Tomassini articulates these contradictions with an expressive power, revealing the tension between perpetuation and absence.
The artist read Philosophy and Italian at the University of Edinburgh, spending a formative year at the University of Bologna specialising in Dantean studies. Her encounter with Dante compelled her towards academia, setting the terms for a practice grounded in conceptual inquiry. Following her studies, she worked as a curator at Factum Foundation, a cultural organisation dedicated to the deployment of advanced technologies in conservation projects. There, she contributed to a three-dimensional recording of Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (c.1463) at Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna, and to the English translation of The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality, a comprehensive catalogue of the foundation’s projects.
As a culmination of her enduring engagement with Dante, Tomassini curated On Reflection: 700 Years of Dante Alighieri at the Crypt Gallery in London in 2021. Bringing together more than thirty contemporary artists, writers, poets, and dancers, the exhibition invited visual, poetic, and choreographic responses to Dante’s legacy. This ambitious convergence of art and literature marked a decisive conclusion to her formative preoccupations.
In 2024, she graduated from the Drawing Year, the postgraduate scholarship programme at the Royal Drawing School in London. There, through rigorous formal and technical experimentation, she expanded her engagement with new cultural themes. Central to this period was a sustained commitment to weekly drawing sessions at the National Gallery, learning directly from the Old Masters through slow and disciplined looking.
As an artist, Tomassini possesses the rare gift of stylistic elusion. Her Uncomfortable Still Life series, a suite of black-and-white images depicting fruit bandaged, stapled, and bound like fetish objects, alludes to the illogical forms of Man Ray and the Surrealists. In her Blue Period works, she subverts the virile melancholia associated with Picasso’s series of the same name, presenting realist drawings of blue menstrual stains in cotton underwear. Elsewhere, she demonstrates a more traditional engagement with academic draughtsmanship. In its attention to foreshortening and formal sobriety, her drawing Marble Bed (2023) recalls Mantegna’s Lamentation (c.1480). Grounded in an insatiable absorption of ideas from the history of art and culture, Tomassini’s work retains a remarkable capacity to surprise. Her work, in its rawness and immediacy, presents a distinctive mode of expression that transcends the self.
Outside of the studio, Tomassini continues to curate projects that animate and extend her wider practice. She is a member of P.L.P.C., a shadow puppet troupe formed with four other artists, with an upcoming performance at Ginny on Frederick in April 2026. She also produces FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, a performance series conceived as a singular, time-bound collaboration, and hosts regular Drawing From Film sessions, cultivating informal spaces for collective looking and making.