b. 1953, London; lives and works in New York
James Nares moved in 1974 from London to New York, where she was active as a musician and filmmaker in the city’s downtown scene. In the 1980s painting became an increasingly important aspect of Nares’s practice, and she began crafting her own brushes in order to achieve an extraordinary result: singular monumental brushstrokes with gestural energy and exacting detail. Over the last several decades, the artist has produced painting, films, and drawings, often utilizing self-developed tools and techniques in order to explore notions of movement and time.
Jamie Nares has been collaborating with Durham Press since the early 2000s, producing screen prints with her signature, large-scale brushstrokes. Since 2016, her printmaking practice has expanded to also include intaglio prints, adapting road-painting machines and spinning-lathes to create striking images that reference her Road Paint and High Speed Cone Graphs Series.
Nares is represented by Paul Kasmin, New York. In 2019 a major retrospective of the artist’s work was mounted at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Nares has had numerous solo shows at Paul Kasmin and other galleries, and her films and visual arts have been featured in individual presentations at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2014); Sundance Film Festival (2014); Cleveland Institute of Art (2013); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); St. Louis Art Museum (2012); and Anthology Film Archives (2008), among many others.
Nares’s work is included in many prominent collections, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire; Long Museum, Shanghai; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
This artist is referred to as James Nares and with the pronouns she/her in all written materials at the request of Nares, who has been public with her gender identity since 2019.