Justin Mortimer was born in 1970 in Shropshire, and is one of Britain's most distinctive contemporary painters, internationally recognised for works that combine technical virtuosity with psychologically charged imagery. Educated at Wells Cathedral School before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he first came to prominence when he won the BP Portrait Award in 1991 while still a student. Early commissions followed from major cultural figures and institutions, including portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, Harold Pinter, David Bowie and Sir Steve Redgrave.

While Justin Mortimer initially gained attention as a portrait painter, his practice has evolved into a broader investigation of contemporary experience. Drawing on imagery sourced from news media, archival photographs, digital screens, and the internet, his paintings explore themes of power, conflict, displacement, mortality and the instability of perception. His works frequently occupy a space between figuration and abstraction, combining exquisitely rendered details with fractured narratives and disquieting visual disruptions.

Over the past three decades Mortimer has developed a highly individual visual language that reflects the uncertainties of a globalised, media-saturated world. His paintings often juxtapose beauty and violence, presence and absence, creating images that are at once seductive and unsettling. Through recurring motifs—including smoke, damaged screens, abandoned clothing, flowers, and fragmented bodies, he examines how contemporary events are mediated, consumed and remembered.

Justin Mortimer has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Significant solo exhibitions include Kult (Parafin, London, 2015), It Is Here (Parafin, London, 2017), Breed (Parafin, London, 2019), and VEIL (OHSH Projects, London, 2024), which brought together several recent bodies of work exploring absence, psychological fragmentation and the traces left by human activity. Justin’s most recent solo exhibition was at Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart.

His paintings have featured in major surveys of contemporary painting and are held in numerous public and private collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Royal Society of Arts. Alongside the BP Portrait Award, Mortimer has received several notable distinctions, including the NatWest Art Prize and the EAST Award.

Living and working in London, Justin continues to expand the possibilities of figurative painting, producing works that confront the political, technological, and psychological realities of the twenty-first century while reaffirming painting's unique capacity to render human experience.