Artist Tom Anholt on Tom Anholt

"I’m a big believer in the honesty or the magic of painting," the London born, Berlin based painter Tom Anholt tells Phaidon.com. "The physical nature of making an artwork, or making a painting, is like a journey."

With his new book Tom Anholt we are inviting readers on that incredible journey.

Tom Anholt, Pilgrimage to the Guru (Planets), 2025. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / Photo: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation Oil on linen, 74 3/4 × 86 5/8 in. (190 × 220 cm)

The first book to survey his career from 2016 to the present, it shows the range of Anholt’s work through a selection of sixty, carefully chosen paintings. An art-historical overview is followed by short texts on individual paintings from world-leading curators, as well as writers that cross the influences and disciplines Anholt is drawn to, which include music, education, and astrophysics.

Tom Anholt, Country House (Lake), 2025. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / artwork photography by Gunter Lepkowski Oil on linen, 45 1/4 × 29 1/2 in. (115 × 75 cm)

Through layered storytelling and vivid allegory, Anholt’s paintings traverse between the cosmic and the everyday. The painter constructs serene, psychologically rich scenes in which nature meets the manmade, often illuminated by glowing moonlight reflecting off watery expanses. His modern-day fables speak to our perpetual and vital desire for wonderment, human interaction, and love. 

Tom Anholt, Hunters in the Snow (After Pieter Bruegel the Elder), 2022. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / artwork photography by Gunter Lepkowski Oil on linen, 74 3/4 × 59 in. (190 × 150 cm)

“To me, painting feels like meditation,” he tells Phaidon.com. “When you're in it, you only exist in the present moment; that lovely thing where there's no past, you're just present. I’ve been doing it daily now for 20 years, so at this point I trust the process of painting much more than I trust the intellectual side of my ability to put things into words.”

Indeed, for Anholt, painting feels almost archeological. “Maybe you start seeing a little glint of a gold coin, or something like the outline of a bone or something. You start feeling, ah, okay, this is this is getting exciting. I can't wait to come back tomorrow.”

As well as the beautifully reproduced sixty paintings, the book features writings by a wide and unusual array of contributors, including: Charity Woodrum (NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center); Derek Fordjour (New York based artist); Sarah Lea (independent art historian, curator, and writer on modern and contemporary art); Nora Abakar (musician); Claire Gilman (Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York); Alison Hearst (Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth); Cathérine Hug (Curator of 20th Century Art at Kunsthaus Zürich); Tessa Praun (curator, educator, and writer); and Laura Smith (Director of Collection and Exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield).

Tom Anholt, Pigeon Racer, 2024. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / artwork photography by Gunter Lepkowski Oil on linen, 74 3/4 × 59 in. (190 × 150 cm) 

“It’s been amazing working on the book because I look back at works I made 10, 15 years ago and I would have no idea how to make them today. Absolutely no idea. But they’re there in the book, and they're like old friends,” Tom tells Phaidon.com.
 
“It's like a previous version of myself made them. But when I look at them in the book I remember the emotions and the feelings of where I was and what I wanted to achieve, my goals, I suppose, within the work. And then there are paintings that have come to me over the course of making the book, that will end up being a year old by the time they go to the next art fair.”

Sample past and present work by getting your copy of Tom Anholt here, and look out for our full interview with Tom in the coming weeks.

Tom Anholt, Deep Dive, 2022. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / artwork photography by Gunter Lepkowski Oil on linen, 74 3/4 × 118 1/8 in. (190 × 300 cm)

Tom Anholt, Pilgrimage to the Guru (Snow), 2025. Image credit: artwork © Tom Anholt and courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley Gallery / Photo: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation Oil on linen, 74 3/4 × 86 5/8 in. (190 × 220 cm)