Phlegm’s work sits somewhere between a riddle and a relic: hybrid figures, uncanny object pairings, and fractured sequences that look as if they were pulled from a half-remembered folktale. In a recent feature for Colossal, the London-based artist described his visual approach as designed to "float in some grey area," a deliberate effort to make images that feel honest without offering tidy meanings.
From microscopic prints to city-scale muralsFor the past several years, Phlegm has turned much of his focus to copper engraving — a craft tied to the Northern Renaissance and to a band of German printmakers known as the Little Masters, who worked on surfaces just an inch or two across. Colossal reports that this shift was so pronounced that Phlegm was "to the point where I pretty much stopped painting murals." Engraving, the artist told Colossal, demands the opposite of mural-making: patience, minute line work, and a near-monastic attention to detail.
That meticulous practice has fed a striking project: a close study and reworking of Albrecht Dürer’s 1513 engraving "Knight, Death, and the Devil." Phlegm told Colossal he "spent a great deal of time collecting old copies of it, studying it under a microscope, and figuring out how the image was created." His response has been to engrave his own version, replacing Dürer’s iconography with his own imagery while attempting to remain true to the original line work and composition.
Despite the small-scale rigor of his printmaking, Phlegm has returned to murals and found that the tiny-format discipline altered his approach to large surfaces. Where a mural once required careful planning for visual impact, engraving’s constraints have made his wall work feel "more fluid and confident," as Colossal describes it.
Across formats, a recurrent practice is intentional omission. Phlegm told Colossal that he often constructs full backstories for his scenes — sometimes writing entire comics-like sequences — then transfers only fragments to the public surface. "I often meticulously work out their history and intricate stories only to leave out large chunks," he said. That fragmentation is part of the point: it reproduces the way we encounter the past through archaeology, where tangible elements provide glimpses of a narrative but rarely the whole context.
That partialness is also tied to an ethic Phlegm calls honesty. Colossal’s piece notes that debates about honesty in art have intensified in the era of the internet, social media, and generative AI. For Phlegm, honesty involves candidness and a refusal to prioritize surface prettiness over narrative substance. "It helps me make something that feels authentic and stops me approaching the space with a mindset tainted by trying to make something look good," he told Colossal. "Looking good tends to come secondary to the storytelling."
Phlegm’s art resists comfortable reading. The compositions invite close looking — both for their draughtsmanship and for the unreliable stories they imply. The imagery borrows from folk ritual, prehistory, and the visual language of printmaking, yet the enigmas are never fully solved. That incompleteness is not a flaw but a strategy: it turns viewers into active participants who supply context, guess motivations, and accept ambiguity.
In practical terms, the interplay between engraving and mural-making is an example of how technical practice can shape meaning. The tiny, controlled marks of copperplate work teach a patience and an eye for detail that changes how scale and narrative operate when the artist goes back to the wall. The Dürer project, as Colossal reports, makes that influence explicit: it is both an homage and a reinvention, a way for historical craft to be interrogated and reimagined for street-scale storytelling.
For readers and viewers, Phlegm’s work matters because it insists on a different mode of looking: slow, attentive, and willing to live with unanswered questions. Colossal’s feature (Kate Mothes) is the primary recent account of this phase in Phlegm’s practice; it provides the quotes and the images that anchor this account.
See the Colossal piece for images and additional context: Enigmatic Iconography and Incomplete Narratives Merge in Phlegm’s Murals and Engravings (Colossal).