Jason Brooks

Born in 1968 in Rotherham, U.K., Jason Brooks studied at Cheltenham Art School and Goldsmiths, before obtaining an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Brooks is closely associated with the generation of artists who emerged in Britain in the early 1990s to great international acclaim and is best known for his photorealist portraiture and monumental landscapes.

Jason Brooks debuted among the YBAs in the 1990s with his black and white portraits. In and of itself, this may be an arbitrary fact, but it highlights an important point: Jason Brooks is a fine artist with an acutely honed skill, but whose artistic vocabulary has more in common with the new Conceptualists and Postmodern punks. Brooks recent work explores old masterpieces and anonymous found paintings, adopting the same techniques, images that he reworks, crops and repaints, reviewing the art historical canon through a contemporary lens. He combines airbrush, acrylic and oil paints in such a way as to explore all aspects of painterly language, as well as to affirm his own place in the trajectory of art history.  On a very simple level, his work affirms the continued faith that painters retain in the medium.

Brooks’ work is held in many private and public collections all around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery Collection, London where he had a solo exhibition of his work in 2008.Previous exhibitions also include New Neurotic Realism, 1998, and I am a Camera, 2001 as well as Van Gogh inspires Jason Brooks at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (October 18, 2019 - January 20, 2020). In 2015 in collaboration with Black Dog Publishing, Marlborough published Perpetual Orgy, a major overview of the artist’s work, written by Michael Bracewell.