We are pleased to share news of former Colstoun Arts resident James Mortimer’s forthcoming exhibition, Brutes, at James Freeman Gallery, opening on Thursday 15 January. The exhibition marks an important moment in Mortimer’s practice, bringing together a body of recent paintings that reflect his sustained interest in the physical and psychological charge of the painted surface.

In Brutes, Mortimer’s work is presented alongside sculptural pieces by Malene Hartmann Rasmussen. Rather than illustrating a single theme, the pairing creates a measured dialogue between image and object, where painting and sculpture hold their own while subtly inflecting one another. Rasmussen’s ceramic forms introduce a sense of weight and tactility that sharpens the viewer’s awareness of Mortimer’s intentional painted decisions, from the handling of paint to the construction of space within the image.

Across the exhibition, the natural world is felt less as a subject than as an underlying force. Mortimer’s paintings draw on close observation and technical control, balancing precision with moments of tension and instability. Together with Rasmussen’s works, Brutes offers a considered reflection on how material, process and form can evoke both familiarity and unease, inviting viewers to look closely and take time with the encounter.

James Mortimer joined Colstoun Arts as a residency artist in September 2024 (for more information on works created by James during his residency please contact us via this website), spending a month living and working at Colstoun House. During that time, his practice was shaped by close observation of the estate’s landscape, architecture and especially the historical trinkets that are found throughout the main house, as well as by sustained periods of studio concentration. The resulting works reveal a painter deeply attentive to structure, surface and architectural accuracy, and to the slow accumulation of meaning through composition and story telling. The works created at Colstoun continue to captivate my attention with their wealth of subplots and interesting scenes.

oil painting of a desert scene with a tree and a man on horseback painted by James Mortimer — ‘Desert with Horseman’ Oil on Canvas 140cm x 140cm, painted at Colstoun for more information please email

Mortimer is an assured and highly disciplined painter. His compositions are densely worked, built through layers of incredibly fine brushwork that focused on precision. Colour is handled with particular sensitivity: skies are modulated through subtle tonal shifts, while vegetation and terrain are articulated through intricate passages of mark-making, and paint removal that reward prolonged looking. There is a confidence to his handling of scale and detail, allowing expansive scenes to coexist with numerous moments of intense intimacy.

The worlds Mortimer constructs feel self-contained yet unstable. Figures, animals and architecture are rendered with equal care, none asserting dominance over the other. His buildings — often meticulously described — function less as specific places than as pictorial devices, anchoring the compositions while remaining curiously provisional. This sense of suspension is heightened by his treatment of space, where perspective gently slips and time feels compressed, drawing the viewer into a psychologically charged terrain.

What distinguishes Mortimer’s work from others is his ability to hold multiple levels at once. The paintings are immediately seductive in their clarity and craft, yet they resist easy reading. Scenes of leisure or pastoral calm are unsettled by small disruptions: a gesture held too long, an object that suggests threat, a relationship between figures that remains unresolved. These tensions are never overstated. Instead, they are embedded within the structure of the painting itself, emerging slowly through looking.

Mortimer has often spoken of painting as a process of sustained attention — of returning repeatedly to the same image until its internal logic begins to assert itself, something that I can attest to having viewed James work over a month. That commitment is evident in the works shown in Brutes. The paintings feel considered rather than illustrative, shaped by decisions made over time rather than by narrative intent, some how the numerous seemingly incoherent scenes make sense when seen within the context of a Mortimer world. Memory, observation and imagination are folded together through paint, resulting in images that feel both personal and oddly collective.

Seen alongside Malene Hartmann Rasmussen’s sculptural works, Mortimer’s paintings gain an added resonance. James trained as a sculptor and many of his works reflect that attention to the 3D world, and while the two artists work in different media, both are concerned with how form and surface can carry psychological charge. Rasmussen’s ceramic figures introduce a physical presence that sharpens the pictorial tension within Mortimer’s landscapes, without overwhelming their quiet complexity.

Brutes is an exhibition that rewards patience. It invites close attention to how images are made, and to the ways technical control can be used not to resolve meaning, but to hold it in suspension. For us at Colstoun Arts, it is a pleasure to see James Mortimer’s work continue to develop beyond his residency, retaining traces of the landscape and time that shaped it in the gallery that he has now called home for numerous solo exhibitions.

Brutes opens at James Freeman Gallery on Thursday 15 January, 6:30–8:30pm. A PDF preview of works will be available shortly before the opening via the gallery’s request link.