Josh Lilley is proud to present True Stories, British painter Tom Anholt's first solo exhibition in the UK.

Anholt's figurative paintings variously evoke Persian miniatures; the shallow depth of field and iconography of Quattrocento painting; tapestries and textiles; and the unbound painterly explorations of Modernism. Formally, Anholt thinks of narrative in cinematic terms, employing cuts, zooms, pans and montage. At times created literally in patchwork with applied areas of canvas, Anholts work calls to the gauziness of a dream and a collided collective memory that reaches across culture and time.

I often describe the painting process as chasing a ball, Anholt writes. Objects and ideas are added and taken away as we move through life and the landscape at speed. The process is an attempt to express this ball in pictorial form. The title of the exhibition, True Stories, refers to a constant theme in the artist's work, the search for a poetic truth through fiction, a phenomenon Werner Herzog called Ecstatic Truth. Poetic, ecstatic truth, can only be reached through fabrication, imagination and stylisation.

Tom Anholt (b. 1987, Bath), is a graduate of the Chelsea College of Art. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at EIGEN + ART, Berlin, and Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen, and is currently participating in the recent painting survey KNOWN/UNKNOWNS at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Anholt lives and works in Berlin.