CONSUMED

Souvenir 438 Space is proud to present Consumed (Swallow The Sky), a solo exhibition by London-based artist Thomas Hjelm in correlation with Frieze London. The show brings together a new body of work that explores surrender in all different forms: to desire, to nature, to another person. It explores it as a route toward a kind of freedom that only exists once the boundary of the self is allowed to dissolve.

Consumed takes as its starting point a familiar but rarely examined sensation: the feeling of being enveloped by one's surroundings. It is the state we fall into when we are lost in desire, at peace surrounded by nature, or simply staring at the sky for long enough that the distinction between observing and disappearing begins to blur. Hjelm's paintings locate this feeling at the meeting point of intimacy and vastness.

The imagery draws directly from archival call cards, the small advertisements once found in London phone boxes that promised connection, pleasure, and escape in a single glance. Hjelm isolates the emotional charge of these images rather than their explicit content: models rendered in states of ecstasy, eyes closed, mouths open in surrender. This asymmetry becomes the emotional architecture of the show, the tension between wanting an experience and actually allowing yourself to have it, between anticipation and release.