Jamie Nares

Jamie Nares (b. 1953) is a British-born American artist whose innovative practice spans painting, film, performance, and photography and who has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art. Born in London, Nares moved to New York in the 1970s and became part of the vibrant downtown art scene that transformed the city during that decade. Her early involvement with No Wave film, experimental music, and performance placed her at the heart of the extraordinary community that produced some of the most inventive work of the era.

Nares is especially renowned today for her large-scale gestural paintings, each created with a single, fluid brushstroke that captures motion, time, and intention within a single suspended gesture. These works bring together the traditions of calligraphy, Minimalism, and performance, and often involve specially designed tools that allow her to apply paint in sweeping, elegant arcs across enormous canvases. The paintings appear at first glance to be spontaneous, but each represents the culmination of an intensely focused physical performance in which the artist commits herself completely to a single unrepeatable gesture. If the mark fails, the canvas is abandoned; if it succeeds, the result carries the full charge of the moment of its making.

Beyond her paintings, Nares has produced an important body of experimental films, including her celebrated Street, a slow-motion cinematic portrait of everyday movement in New York City. Her photographs, performances, and moving-image works extend the same fundamental concerns with time, gesture, and the body across a wider range of media, and together they form one of the most coherent artistic statements of her generation.

Nares's art is included in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and she has been the subject of significant museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad. A transgender woman, Nares has spoken openly about identity and expression, and she continues to be a vital and dynamic voice in contemporary art, extending her signature investigations of gesture and time into new territories with each passing year.