Jonathan Waller

Jonathan Waller has been a practicing artist since 1985, exhibiting nationally and internationally in over 120 exhibitions. He has represented the UK in two major international art exhibitions – The New British Painting that toured the USA and Kunst Europa in Germany. He has work in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery, the Contemporary Art Society, and the Government Art Collection. Waller’s numerous awards include – First Prize Winner in Midland View Three (Nottingham), Junior Painting Fellowship (Cardiff), and the Mark Rothko Travelling Scholarship.

The majority of Waller’s work has been autobiographical, often combined with social commentary and reflections on the human condition. His early work, as well as dealing with the disappearing British industrial landscape of the 1980s, was strongly related to the decline and death of his mother from MND. In the 1990s he made a large series of controversial pictures on the theme of natural childbirth after the arrival of his first child. There then followed a period of making large head sculptures and installations that explored the process of aging using found materials, wax, driftwood, and text. In 2016, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death he was commissioned to create an up-to-date version of the Seven ages of Man from As You Like It which hung for the year in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare is buried. More recently, since retiring from Coventry University where he was an Associate Professor, his work has turned to the universal theme of death and its inevitability, using references from many different cultural and art historical sources.