James Dearlove

Artist Profile

James Dearlove (b. 1970, Nairobi, Kenya). Lives and works in Cornwall.

James Dearlove is a figurative painter whose work centres on the human body set in dim, twilit spaces. He builds each painting on a ground of collaged paper, then works over it in oil and acrylic, so that the surface is divided and interrupted before any image is laid down.

Dearlove assembles his compositions from squares of de-acidified newspaper, newsprint and layout paper fixed to linen or canvas, a method that draws on the cubist techniques of collage, assemblage and multiple viewpoints. The grid of paper remains visible beneath the paint, breaking figures and settings into overlapping planes. Most works are large, typically 150 x 150 cm and reaching 197 x 225 cm in Soda Lake Landscape with Figures and Birds (2021). Male figures recline on beds, swim in pools or drift on rafts, often accompanied by animals such as birds, moths, sea creatures and a crocodile, with flesh lit against dark, merging grounds. The paintings draw on his life as a gay man, first in the city and more recently in rural Cornwall.

Dearlove read English Literature at University College London before taking an MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1994, and later completed the Turps Banana Correspondence Course (2019 to 2020). He won the Ingram Prize in 2021 and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2023, exhibiting at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, and Camden Art Centre, London. Solo exhibitions include The Trilling Wire at galeriepcp, Paris (2025), with Gertrude Art, and Tales of the City, Tales of the Sea at BWG Gallery, London (2023). In 2024 he presented a solo booth at Platform, London Art Fair, curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley. He works with General Assembly, London.

His work is held in the Ingram Collection.