This Isn’t Heaven, Thomas Tomczak (2025)

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Mwa presents This Isn’t Haven a book of images, drawings, and interviews by painter Thomas Tomczak. Spurned by love, Tomczak set out to catalog every depiction of demons in the city of New York.

The title is available for purchase at Printed Matter.

Tomczak encountered 109 works of art and architecture spanning thousands of years, from an amulet fashioned to repel a baby-eating demoness to the stone grotesque above Jeffrey Epstein’s former front door. How do we make sense of heartbreak, misfortune, and even unfathomably bad behavior? Historically, we have rendered visible that which plagues us.
Tomczak’s encounters result in a visual essay that reckons with the visages of demons and the body language of struggle, revealing common tropes and humorous undertones. Tomczak comes to the project as a representational painter long interested in the translation of internal states to external forms.
Tomczak speaks with a psychoanalyst, a writer, an occultist, and an Assyrian scholar, posing the same broad question to each: So...demons? The conversations provide a context beyond the binary of good and evil. What is demonic in relation to romantic obsession? Is there true horror in a horror film?
This Isn’t Heaven is both a record of inquiry for a painter and a product in itself. Through images, drawings, and interviews, Tomczak attempts to mitigate a gnawing concern. In making This Isn’t Heaven, Tomczak partakes in the same impulse as the artworks he catalogs: to create in order to contest the demonic.

© 2025 Mwa Books LLC