Justin Mortimer

Jockey Club

Justin Mortimer is a contemporary (born 1970) British artist who creates figurative works set in outdoor landscapes and paints commissioned portraits. Justin has created portraits for a number of important people, most notably his controversial painting of the Queen in 1997. His modernistic representation of the queen was met with public disapproval from Britain and other commonwealth countries, newspapers ran headlines such as “Off With her Head!”, interestingly Lucien Freud’s (previously discussed) portrait of the queen was dismissed by the public, who viewed it as an ugly portrait. Justin’s more recent work features bodies, often missing some anatomical part, or having multiple, appearing in coloured landscapes, often nondescript patches of colour, trees, uninhabited buildings, trees. Justin’s paint application is raw, often impasto and bold, sometimes thin and sometimes left with blank canvas.

La Cabanial

“Your current work now plays with fragmented bodies amalgamated with fragmented landscapes. There seems to be quite a lot of mimicking between the bodies and characteristics of the landscape. How do you choose the combination of your subject matter in terms of figure and place? Or perhaps, is it dependant on a narrative you are trying to create?”
JM- Well the figures are often either my girlfriend, myself or images I’ve gotten off of the internet, scanned from magazines or similar types of media, and also photographs taken of friends. What I tend to look for is just a particular shape in the body. Often it is a tilt or a lack of symmetry, a sort of imbalance, which is all part of this imbalance that I strive to get in my pictures; an emotional imbalance if you like. I’ll often choose a leg that has a tilt but also has a good structural relationship with the scene in which it’s been placed. The scene is very important in terms of how the person relates to it. It almost becomes like a painting of a sculpture. I often think about my paintings in three-dimensional terms. The leg is tilted and juxtaposed against perhaps a stick coming out of the ground, a tree stump, or even just a shape behind it. This is to create some kind of tension between the elements; it brings out the anxiety and the awkwardness that I’m trying to get out of the picture.


Justin is interested in the underlying structures of the figure, the anatomy below the skin, taking inspiration from medical photography. This interest stemmed from childhood experience of surgical procedures on his leg and being photographed by doctors. Justin writes “Having made a living as a portrait painter for twenty odd years, I just found it more interesting now to paint how a face could suddenly be taken away in a car accident or could be broken somehow”. This results in a representation of the figure that is far away from traditional representation of the figure, while maintaining some realism of the body. Much like Lucien Freud, Justin Mortimer isn’t interested in portraying beauty. Beauty is treated as a by product of the painting technique, the figures created in the painting aren’t necessarily luscious skin paintings( like Rubens) but fragmented figures, seeming out of place in their habitat. The beauty in Justin’s work results from his unique painting approach and technique, the beauty is the unnerving monolith painted spaces that are both powerful and subtle.

A collage

This moment of rupture can take any form. Sometimes the form is a scraped away hand, an area of blank canvas, a massive monolithic application of paint, or a cut away figure. The result is always one of discord, when the narrative or legibility of the painting is silenced and another much more disturbing air enters the fray. The use of guerrilla tactics undoubtedly results in a kind of violence, but that is not to say that the paintings do not still posses delicacy or even melancholic contemplation. 2007 Pippy Houldsworth Gallery Press Release

family plot 2007

Queen 1997

Justin Mortimer creates a painting by beginning with a collage. Photographs of figures, taken of his girlfriend, friends,from magazines or the internet and placed on images of landscapes. Justin describes the landscape as” psychological spaces as much as real places; the paranoid landscape”. The collage is scaled up and painted on the canvas, then through continual altering and redrafting, the image emerges charged with emotive tension and anxiety.



“The picture isn’t realized, it’s a combination of a lot of confusing elements being imposed and it often makes the pictures quite hard to read.” This is perhaps the reason why Justin’s work stands out, and appears both seductive and nauseating.

Justin’s figures represent dissociation between the head and body, between the people in the paintings, and the people and the landscape. He creates work that is modern, using modern techniques such as Photoshop composing; he incorporates abstraction and realism in his tension charred works. Justin is a unique artist with a bold and distinctive vision that seems to fit into our time in a way that few artists achieve.



Quotes taken from an interview with Justin Mortimer
by David Yu
http://www.artslant.com/lon/articles/show/7961