Oil on canvas, 80 x 80cm
About
Guided by Nietzsche’s conviction that life is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon, my practice is centred around economies of desire and overcoming. The canvas becomes a threshold where sensation is distilled: not into resolution, but into intensity. The raw material of a complex history is forged into a meditation on resilience and becoming.
The work navigates a necessary tension between abstraction and figuration, mirroring the struggle to find coherence within entropy. I coined the term libidinal expressionism to describe what the mark is doing and to foreground its core concerns. It draws on two texts that have remained central across two decades of work: Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. Within this context, I explore the dark feminine, primal desire, refusal and the aesthetics of confrontation. Figures and fragmented vignettes surface as residues of a sustained inquiry into the mythic and the metaphysical, rather than illustrations of it.
Beyond the aforementioned, the thinkers who have most shaped my approach are those for whom philosophy is a confrontation with the real rather than a rationalisation: Nietzsche, above all, then Bataille and Heidegger – alongside a long-standing engagement with Gnostic cosmology and the wider esoteric and hermetic traditions. These are not separate influences but a single, if unruly, current: a study of drives, of hidden structures, of the way intensity and meaning erupt at the edges of rational order.
My practice is grounded in a direct understanding of life’s fragility and endurance. It is a philosophical response shaped by formative experiences outside conventional narratives – a compelled questioning of all structures, which now fuels a relentless search for the patterns and forces that shape a life. The work does not depict this history; it is the logical, aesthetic output of a mind forged within it.
https://www.instagram.com/karose222/
https://substack.com/@karose222
Education
Fine Art BA, Goldsmiths, University of London. Foundation Diploma in Fine Art, Hackney Community College, London. Printmaking (etching) and life drawing at the Royal Drawing School (formerly The Prince’s Drawing School).
All qualifications were undertaken in the name Kelly Tomkins.
© Kelly Rose, 2026