Justin Mortimer (born 1970 in Cosford, United Kingdom) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1988 to 1992. In 1991, he won the BP Portrait Award. He made a number of commissions, including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts. He lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

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 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.

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.