The human form is malleable and transformative in Dig, Harry Spike’s debut solo exhibition at Cob Gallery, London. In these paintings, bodies emerge in and out of vivid landscapes, reaching out for some – often obscure – object of desire with blurred, formless faces. This act of erasure carries a specific intent, a way of making viewers reconsider what it is they’re looking at. “For me, when a face appears in an image, our eyes linger on it the longest. Often, I find them even when they are not there,” Spike explains. “It is a device used to imply my distance from the subject. I want to create a sense of push and pull within the space. It almost feels like there is a voyeuristic element at play.” In Anyone’s Will But Your Own (2023), a faceless figure lies in what appears to be an upward dog yoga pose, surrounded by abstract and reflective images in an uncanny landscape. 

For Spike, the new work that makes up Dig is a step towards what he calls “removing local colour”. With backgrounds becoming more abstract and unmoored, the body and its setting are increasingly difficult to separate; the figure and the landscape begin to merge. Icarus Wheel (2025) centres a shirtless body, but many of its recognisable human elements are beginning to disappear into the landscape, with another abstract figure, arms outstretched, looming behind.

Spike argues that it would be “too convenient to frame this solely in relationship to the new exhibition and the theme of digging”, and that the merging of body and landscape has been a shift in his practice for a while now. “Decomposing,” he says, “might be too morbid a word.” It seems fitting then, that Piero della Francesca’s Renaissance painting The Resurrection became a touchstone for the show – as Piero is a touchstone for Spike, as someone who “has always guided me when I’ve needed help with a composition”. Instead of focusing on the finality of decomposition, or the moment of resurrection, Dig seems to capture that feeling of excavation, of going beneath the surface and understanding the layers on which everything – our landscapes, our lovers, our art – are built. After Piero offers a queer reimagining of The Resurrection, with Spike describing his practice as “an extension of my identity, so it feels entirely natural to translate art-historical paintings through a queer lens”. 

While the bodies and desires that run through much of Dig are a reflection of Spike’s queerness, as in the stolen kiss from Car Park (2025), these ever-shifting landscapes are rooted in the Peak District, where the artist was born and raised. And yet, he tells me that the new work revealed the place to him in a different way: “Something shifted this year, and the backgrounds became familiar. The figures now exist in a landscape that is close to my heart, the place where I grew up and first made sense of the world.”

Making sense of the world seems to be the act that Spike’s figures – who are, he says, “portraits of people close to my heart, intentionally or otherwise” – are engaged in, as they try to make sense of nascent desires, loves lost, and an attempt to find their footing in an unsteady world. This serves as the beating heart of Dig, a tireless attempt to understand things even as they shift before our eyes, just as Spike’s figures oscillate in and out of the background; what is, what was, and what could be all existing in dialogue.

Dig by Harry Spike is running at Cob Gallery until 28 February 2026.