Jonathan Wateridge has, in 2026, done what most painters only dream of: he has moved from one of the world’s most prestigious galleries to another, with a solo show at GRIMM’s St James’s outpost opening in September. It is the kind of career arc that confirms an artist’s place in the contemporary canon, and yet Wateridge remains, by his own account, something of an imposter. He did not set out to be a painter. He spent fourteen years drawing cartoons for The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and The Economist. He trained in Glasgow, dropped out, and for a long stretch considered becoming a theatre director. The paintings that now command prices in excess of £300,000 are, in a very real sense, the work of a man who found his way back to the canvas through a side door.
The Norfolk Studio and the Art of Solitude
The studio, as Wateridge described it to Apollo Magazine in February, is a converted agricultural unit in south Norfolk, five hundred and fifty square metres of raw space just steps from his front door. He has lived there since 2017, having decamped from east London with his family. “Among other things it was an amazing opportunity to convert a 550 sqm agricultural unit into a studio and not have to pay unaffordable London rents for a similar-sized space,” he told the magazine. “I thought that if no one’s looking, who cares? Do what you want and take more risks.”
The space is, by his own admission, inhospitable in winter – “it’s too big to heat so it can be bitterly cold” – but it has proven transformative to his practice. There is no chair, no kettle, no creature comforts. Just canvases, paper, paint, and the detritus of a working painter. When he first arrived, he assumed the room was needed for the construction of elaborate sets, the hallmark of his earlier work. But the move to Norfolk coincided with a stylistic liberation. “Once I moved here my work very quickly became more improvised and abstracted,” he said.
The studio’s isolation has also deepened his commitment to solitude. “Painting with someone else in the room has always made me feel uncomfortable and self-aware, which I never want to feel when working,” he explained. He listens to nothing while he paints, or as little as possible – classical music, northern soul, anything that does not demand too much of his attention. “Someone too interesting or arresting, such as Nick Cave, is really hard to work to because it demands too much of your attention.”
The Fabricated Real
To understand Wateridge’s method, you need to understand his sets. In his earlier work – the period that brought him to the attention of François Pinault and the international art market – he constructed large, immersive environments in his studio and populated them with actors or art students. The scenes he depicted, rendered at enormous scale on canvases measuring three by four metres or larger, were meticulously staged. He would shoot between 1,500 and 2,000 photographs of each arrangement, then paint from the digital archive, iPad in one hand, brush in the other.
The instructions to his actors were minimal, more prompts than scripts. Often, they simply complained about their jobs, and even that – the authentic texture of boredom or frustration – found its way into the finished painting. As he told Creativity’s UK in September 2025, “Everything that happens in these works, happens here,” gesturing around the studio. Behind him stood a full-size garden annexe, a theatrical prop with glass doors slid shut on a stark wooden interior. “Everything I paint is constructed.”
This process – building a reality, documenting it, then distilling it into paint – reached its narrative peak in Another Place, a series of seven paintings tracing a loose plot across scenes from a fictional film about the murder of a Hollywood architect. Exhibited at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the series cemented Wateridge’s reputation and gave him the freedom to push further into what he calls the “midwife” role: offering ideas without concluding them, constructing stories that remain open to interpretation.
The Long Way Back
The road to this point was neither straight nor assured. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1972, Wateridge was raised in London and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He abandoned painting almost immediately. At nineteen, he says, “conceptually, painting felt unjustified.” It seemed a form burdened by its own history, unable to speak to the present. He dropped out.
What followed was a period of searching. He made a short film – “terrible,” he says – took acting classes, and drifted towards theatre. The breakthrough came in Madrid, in the Prado, in front of the Velázquez paintings. He spent a week there and, he claims, “learned more than in the previous decade.” The Spanish master’s ability to render psychological depth and atmospheric weight with apparent effortlessness showed Wateridge a path forward. At thirty-two, he returned to painting.
The fourteen years he spent as a cartoonist – drawing for the TLS, The Spectator, and The Economist – were not wasted. “The irony is that all of that is now used in my work,” he reflected. “I’m fascinated by stories, but I don’t create them, I offer them. I don’t like to conclude things.” His illustrative work sharpened his sense of economy and narrative compression; his painting absorbed the rest.
From Sets to Surface
The most significant development in Wateridge’s recent career is the dissolution of his set-building apparatus. The elaborate constructions that defined his early paintings have been superseded by a more fluid, expressive process. Each canvas is now heavily worked, sometimes over many months, and the evidence of that labour – the revisions, the changes of direction, the layers of decision – has become increasingly visible on the surface.
“Because obviously painting is so still, a slight statuesque awkwardness can work in a way that doesn’t as a photograph,” Wateridge said in the monograph Uncertain Swimmer (2023). “So it’s been interesting over the years working out what I can live with and what I can’t in terms of material.” The tension between realistic depiction and cinematic suggestion remains, but the theatricality is no longer outsourced to physical sets. It is embedded in the paint itself.
This shift has produced some of Wateridge’s most compelling work. The Pool series (2015–2022) featured translucent poolside figures whose hazy outlines evoked the fragmentary surfaces of ancient sculpture. Red Desert (2025), acquired by the GRIMM collection, depicts a woman half-turned towards the viewer with a startled expression, as though caught mid-escape. The figure is almost absorbed into her surroundings – atomised, translucent, uncertain. The effect is deeply cinematic yet unmistakably painterly, a quality that has drawn comparisons to Gerhard Richter and Lucian Freud.
In February 2026, his Amsterdam exhibition No Longer, Not Yet presented paintings on paper – works that reveal the rawness of his current process. The forthcoming London show, opening 3 September at 43a Duke Street, St James’s, promises further development of this more atmospheric register. The press release describes figures that “dissolve into dream-like spaces, where distant interiors unfold alongside tempestuous land and seascapes that echo the arrangements of classical painting,” drawing on the Greek concept of peripeteia – the sudden reversal of fortune.
Collections and Recognition
Wateridge’s paintings are now held in an impressive constellation of private and institutional collections. The Pinault Collection in Paris and Venice includes his work, as does the Saatchi Collection in London, the Rennie Collection in Vancouver, the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, and the AkzoNobel Art Foundation in Amsterdam. His paintings were included in So British! 10 Masterpieces from the Pinault Collection at the Esplanade Fine Art Museum Marcel Duchamp in Rouen. In 2025, he was featured in A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, curated by Tom Morton – a survey that included works by forty artists across the breadth of contemporary British painting.
He was included in The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting 3 (2024), the third comprehensive anthology of the medium, alongside Louise Giovanelli, Caroline Walker, and Rosalind Nashashibi. His painting Swim (2019) was chosen as the cover image for Honor Jones’s novel Sleep, published by Riverhead Books in 2025 – a rare crossover into literary culture that confirms the emotional resonance of his images beyond the gallery world.
Why It Matters Now
In an art market saturated with digital production, AI-generated imagery, and the relentless churn of concept-driven work, Wateridge’s commitment to oil on linen is both counterintuitive and quietly radical. He is aware of the scepticism. “Some people still question painting’s relevance,” he told Creativity’s UK. “They say, it’s already been done. But the point is, it hasn’t been done now.”
What makes Wateridge’s current moment significant is the convergence of technical mastery and emotional openness. The paintings are no longer mere transcriptions of staged events. They are acts of excavation – layers of paint revealing and concealing in equal measure, figures suspended between presence and disappearance. The Norfolk solitude has stripped away the apparatus of artifice and left something more raw, more vulnerable, and ultimately more truthful.
When GRIMM opens its doors at Duke Street in September, it will present an artist who has spent three decades finding his way to exactly the right kind of failure – the kind that opens up unexpected choices. “Sometimes that’s about technical execution and a case of just putting in the hours,” Wateridge said of his studio routine. “Other times it’s more open to play and following a scent and seeing where the work takes you. That’s always the best kind of day in the studio – even if it ends in failure, it always opens up unexpected choices.”
In the quiet of the Norfolk countryside, away from the noise of London, Jonathan Wateridge is painting futures he could never have scripted.
Jonathan Wateridge is at GRIMM, 43a Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6DD, 3 September–10 October 2026.
