SORRY

    Medusa invited German painter Tom Król to present his series ‘Heads’ in Brussels — the city in which he lived for a couple of years and where he started working on these series.

Tom Król (Cologne, 1991) is a German painter who lives and works in Cologne. He graduated in 2017 at the University of Design of Offenbach am Main in the painting department. SORRY marks the reunion of his series ‘Heads’: a gathering of portraits which could only happen in Brussels — the very place where this series was initiated.

Tom Król’s ‘Heads’ display the basic traces of a portrait — yet as one might consider them more as masks, Tom prefers the term ‘head’, as they reveal themselves naked and open, inviting a viewer’s gaze into their inside.
      Tom’s paintings trigger our sense of pareidolia: the human tendency to — upon very little visual cues — deceptively recognise a face in things that aren’t faces. As such, Tom Król stretches the boundaries of what we call a head; playing around with contours, paint traces and abstract shapes, whilst still leaving enough suggestions for a head to emerge. His moments of painting probe the extent of pareidolia and Tom knows exactly when to stop: Suddenly the cues for a face materialise, and serendipity births a new person coming out of the void. We asked Tom what these heads would say if they could talk to the visitor. He answered they would ask a very simple question, one that is often posed upon new spontaneous encounters: “how are you?”