JONATHAN WATERIDGE
Jonathan Wateridge
* 1972 Lusaka, Zambia – lives in London
Jonathan Wateridge grew up in Zambia and at the age of 18 moved to the UK, where in the early 1990s he studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art. In his works, he examines the subliminal impact of photographic and cinematic images from our everyday life.
Exhibitions

2 November 2017 – 22 January 2018
2 November 2017 – 22 January 2018
Jonathan Wateridge
Swimmer
The works of the artist, born in Zambia and trained in the United Kingdom, are extremely complex, in spite of or precisely because of their seemingly simple form at first sight. In their complexity, Wateridge’s paintings resemble those of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Here and there, there is an external framework that suggests a simple content to the viewer, and here and there, there is an “extra” of knowledge, messages and mysteries that must be deciphered. Wateridge’s art is highly contextual.
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Catalogue
Excerpt
“One of the key recurring figures in this latest series of work is the inclusion of the figure of an African swimmer. An inversion of the ‘all American’ swimmer encapsulated by Ned Merrill in the 1968 film, he represents for Wateridge the spectre of colonial history that haunts the white denizens in their carefully crafted idyllic and tranquil setting.”
Mark Sanders