Jeremy Gardiner is a landscape painter with a deep interest in geology and time. His vision of landscape captures the environmental and industrial processes that shape the surface of the earth. His work has addressed industrial, urban and coastal landscapes, focusing as much on the natural phenomena that have changed them, as the human traces he finds.
Growing up in London, he spent summers by the sea in rural, Southwest England. Recent paintings of the coastline derive from his cumulative experience of walking along it, sailing past it and flying over it, studying changes wrought over millennia as well as during his lifetime. Using the medium of painting, Gardiner brings to his work a vital knowledge of contemporary practices, such as digital mapping and imagery, as tools to shape and transform what he sees. In so doing, he invites the viewer to reflect on their own transient relationship with the physical world.
Gardiner studied at Newcastle University (BFA 1975-9) and the Royal College of Art, London (MFA 1980-83), before moving to the United States from 1984 to 1999. He currently lives and works in the city of Bath, England. For nearly four decades he has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Chengdu Biennale in China. In London, he is represented by The Portland Gallery, London. Two monographs have been published about his work, Unfolding Landscape (Lund Humphries, 2013) and South by Southwest (Sansom & Co, 2020), which include essays by art historians, curators and critics. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Miami Herald, and in numerous British publications, including The Guardian and The Sunday Times.
Between 2014 and 2015 Gardiner visited Cornwall, Devon and Dorset on England’s South coast, producing 36 paintings and 40 watercolours depicting spectacular locations where lighthouses were erected to guide vessels to safety. His exhibition Pillars of Light (2016) was shown at The Nine British Art in London. A documentary film following the painter’s journey won the Fine Arts Documentary prize at the Fine Arts Film Festival of Santa Barbara and was a Finalist in the BLOW-UP Chicago Arthouse Film Festival in 2016.
In 2020, Gardiner completed a five-year painting expedition along the South coast of England, inspired by engravings made by the British artist William Daniell for Voyage Around the Coast of England, between 1813 and 1823. This culminated in Gardiner’s touring exhibition South by Southwest, a series of 72 paintings and 60 watercolours, accompanied by a monograph of the same name, looking afresh at the harbours, bays, coves, castles and follies that characterize the area’s remarkable shoreline
In 2021, Gardiner’s work was selected for the Chengdu Biennale Superfusion. His ongoing desire to build new audiences for his work prompted him to apply to the British Council for a UK-China Connections through Culture grant, which he was awarded in March 2022.
Strata, a series of 20 paintings on poplar panel and 80 on handmade paper by landscape artist Jeremy Gardiner (b.1957), celebrates the Jurassic Coast on the 25th anniversary of its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Gardiner has studied this coast for decades, constantly developing techniques to depict its changing textures. He revisited twenty locations every year from 2018 to 2022, painting in different seasons and weather conditions. Just as landfalls alter the coast, Gardiner combined subtractive and additive processes, cutting, scraping and chiselling, marbling, pouring, distressing, sanding then repainting the works’ surfaces to reflect the passage of geological time. The resulting paintings break new ground through their conceptual rigour and assimilation of techniques informed by science, geomorphology and digital mapping. At a time when Earth’s environment is increasingly threatened, Strata provides a record of this unique, precious coastline.