Bio

Hamit Üçok (b. 1995) is a Cypriot-British artist living and working in London. Born and raised in Cyprus, he moved to the UK to pursue his education in Fine Art. He received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Hertfordshire and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

Selected Exhibitions

There is an Island III, Cyprus High Commission, London (2025–26); There is an Island, Cyprus High Commission, London (2024); Little Explosions, The Bomb Factory South, London (2022); Come One, Come All, The Function Suite, London (2022); London Grads Now. 21, Saatchi Gallery, London (2021); RCA Painting Satellite Degree Show, Cromwell Place, London (2021).

Statement

My paintings explore the unstable relationship between images, memory and representation. I create visual traps that reveal how quickly the mind constructs meaning from what it sees. Working from personal photographs, found images, film stills and archival material, I isolate and reconfigure fragments of visual information, breaking their narrative obligations and allowing familiar subjects to become ambiguous and estranged. Allegory emerges through this displacement, allowing an image to point beyond its apparent subject without settling into a fixed narrative.

Cinematic devices such as cropping, zooming and enlargement destabilise the photographic certainty of these images. I am drawn to the remnant or leftover: an isolated gesture, object, figure or architectural fragment whose original context has become inaccessible. Through rubbing, glazing and erasure, photographic documentation becomes suspended between memory and invention, familiarity and otherness. Rather than depicting an event directly, I am interested in its aftermath and what remains once its narrative begins to recede.

This transformation is deliberately slow. In a world saturated by rapidly circulating images, painting demands a different kind of attention. I work over extended periods, reconsidering, obscuring and returning to an image. Paint gives these subjects back their opacity and capacity to remain partially unknown, inviting the viewer to fill their absences with assumptions, memories and projections.

Much of my recent work emerges from growing up in Cyprus, an island shaped by colonialism, conflict, displacement and continuing division. My father was born during the intercommunal violence of the 1960s, spent eleven years in a refugee camp and lost family members during the war in 1974. My mother grew up in Iran and left amid political upheaval and repression. I inherited these histories without witnessing them directly, growing up among their aftermath through places, memories, family narratives and silences.

Leaving Cyprus for London created a physical and psychological distance from these histories. Within the paintings, personal memory encounters wider histories of migration, borders, recognition and belonging. Rather than resolving these histories, I preserve something of their enigma, creating images that resist immediate recognition and remain open to multiple interpretations.