James Mortimer

ARTIST PROFILE

James Mortimer (b. 1989, United Kingdom)

James Mortimer is a painter and sculptor of singular vision, an artist who has built an entire world of his own making. He studied sculpture at the Bath School of Art and Design, where he received the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize, though it is painting that has become his primary vehicle — and the work, from the outset, has been entirely and unmistakably his.

Mortimer's practice draws deeply on the traditions of Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting, filtered through a sensibility that is at once darkly comedic and profoundly literate. His canvases depict reimagined Edens — luminous, haze-drenched landscapes populated by languid figures and mercurial beasts, coexisting on increasingly equal terms. These are worlds of unchecked impulse and moral ambiguity, where human vanity, carnal appetite, and the absurdity of the human condition play out with a kind of blasé nonchalance. Visual wit runs through the work like a current — every gesture loaded, every fruit and plant pregnant with suggestion.

Yet for all their irreverence, the paintings carry deep undercurrents. In exploring humanity's longing for innocence and communion with nature, Mortimer touches on something ancient — the tension, carried forward from myth and folklore, that any desire for paradise is already compromised by the act of desiring it. His impressive handling of paint lends the scenes a timelessness that makes them feel at once centuries old and startlingly present.

Following his studies, Mortimer travelled extensively through post-communist Eastern Europe and into China — journeys that continue to inform the richness of his visual vocabulary. His work has appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Saatchi Gallery, and Christie's London, and he has exhibited widely with galleries including James Freeman Gallery, Prince & Pilgrim, Catto Gallery, and BWG Gallery. He was Artist in Residence at Colstoun Arts in September 2024.

His work is held in private and institutional collections across Europe, the United States, and Asia.