Justin Mortimer (born in 1970 in Cosford, the United Kingdom, residing and working in London, the United Kingdom) is a contemporary painter best known for his surreal oil paintings, often large in scale, marked by darkness and the absurd. Groups of figures populate moody interiors, dazzling landscapes, or dark forests. Muted skin tones, tormented poses, and the recurrence of mysterious motifs form a continuum throughout the highly regarded British virtuoso’s hallucinated scenes and complex narratives.
"Interviewer: The show has a great sense of continuity, although some paintings have many years between them. This indicates your oeuvre has a clear vision, process, and objective. What are the fundamental principles when you start a painting or a series of works, and have they shifted over the years?
Justin Mortimer: I don’t spend much time thinking about the themes; they emerge intuitively. Over the last decade, these themes seem to have explored the dark side, so the paintings are connected in that way. I recently did work with what I thought of as having less loaded content, for instance, the flower series ‘Hoax,’ ‘Taxa,’ and ‘Breed.’ But even these turned out to be meditations on mortality. Some have commented that my work is about the abject and the pitiable, and they are right in some parts, but when I look back on a show such as Tomorrow, I also see the humane, and the empathetic.
But what is undeniably changing is my approach to the painting itself. In some series, I am allowing the abstract to come to the fore and maybe a little bit more freedom in the painterly attack. I’m also interested in introducing new techniques, whether it be different oil mediums or spray painting. It’s been important to bring back the playful elements, the sheer enjoyment of smearing color around. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves why we became painters in the first place.”
(Contemporary Art Issue, “An Interview with Justin Mortimer: The Artist as a Junkie”)