Justin Mortimer. Bruchlinien
Augustenstraße 63
March 27 – April 25, 2026

Opening – Justin Mortimer is present
Friday, March 27, 2026, 6 pm – 9 pm

Justin Mortimer builds his paintings from collisions. Figures, objects, and fragments of landscape are brought together in scenes that feel at once meticulously staged and strangely unstable. A body slips partially out of view, a face is hidden, a familiar setting is disrupted by an element that does not belong. What initially appears coherent begins to fracture the longer one looks.

The works from recent years brought together in this exhibition reflect a practice concerned with how images operate – how they attract, mislead, conceal, and unsettle. Justin Mortimer draws on a vast reservoir of source material, gathering imagery from second-hand books, medical manuals, online archives, and his own photographs. These elements are digitally collaged into provisional compositions before being translated into paint, where the image is continuously reworked: painted over, scraped back, adjusted, sometimes radically redirected. Many canvases retain traces of earlier decisions, allowing the viewer to sense the painting as something formed through revision rather than execution.

Paint itself plays an active role in this tension. Fluid passages dissolve into sharply focused detail; thin veils of color sit beside dense, worked surfaces. Justin Mortimer often pushes color slightly beyond the believable – skies turn sulphurous, light becomes artificial, brightness carries a toxic edge – creating images that are visually seductive yet faintly threatening. Beauty, here, is inseparable from disturbance.

These paintings are characterized by their psychological charge. Justin Mortimer rarely presents a complete narrative. Instead, something appears to have already happened – or to be on the verge of happening – just outside the viewer’s grasp. Key information is withheld, subjects are obscured, and attention is subtly redirected. Looking becomes an act of searching. One does not passively observe these works; one enters them, aware of occupying the uncertain position between witness and intruder.

Without describing specific events, the paintings resonate with contemporary anxieties: the fragility of the body, the instability of social structures, the uneasy proximity of violence, and the persistent sense that the familiar can tip into the strange. Yet they never become illustrative. It is precisely this unresolved nature that defines them.

Justin Mortimer (born 1970 in Cosford, UK) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK, in 1992. He won the BP Portrait Award in 1991, leading to a number of commissions, including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at venues including the Parafin Gallery, London (2019), Haunch of Venison, London (2012) and the Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011). He is featured in the publication “Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting,” published by Phaidon in 2011. He lives and works in London, UK.