Jonathan Wateridge’s exhibition Some Distance Apart is the true milestone in what is already an intense and forward-looking painting career. The title might be read as the parting gesture of a fading relationship. The paintings argue, from the perspective of one lovelorn participant, the opposite. The show is the result of a path from a background of near-photorealism to an impressionistic form of painting that courts perspective as a material around figures caught in movement, physical and emotional.
The people in the paintings might be moving away, last glimpses caught in the light before falling into shadow. But like old photographs, studied again, bent from time in a back drawer or a cracked plastic tub of past things, they remind us of the parts of ourselves that other lives once held.
In the past, Wateridge painted from sets he built full-scale, dressed with actors and shot on film (FAD Magazine 2016), rendering them with an attention to light that photographs struggle to capture. Perhaps that’s why he hesitates calling it photorealism (Tierney n.d.). The trick was in the making. “You believe in the image precisely because it is a painting” (Wateridge, cited in Federico 2010). Following a move to Norfolk, the work has become more improvised and abstracted (Apollo 2026), often painted to look cut and collaged. But the stage never left. It moved inside the paint, into a deep recognition of the image as power and platform, and of art itself as place.
Wateridge likes the idea of “these figures being artefacts from the past but seeing them strangely in the present” (Wateridge, cited in Tierney n.d.). That’s the closeness. The bent vision puts the image at a distance; we’re looking, but we’re made to look, we’re made self-aware. The gaps in the figures, where the background comes through, have a noir feel that is impossible to escape.
Diorama (2026) shows creased, cut-out ‘swimming’ figures, powering through layers of foam, cloud and darkness. Within the foam, lines of shade suggest pop-up books, or the tunnel books and peepshows where a fixed perspective creates depth for the viewer. Here the depth is warped to accentuate the tension in the cut-out figures. It could be, as the title suggests, a diorama, but the way the layers interact brings the viewer closer.
Other works in the show approach the same tension in more subtle ways, but once you find his way of seeing, it becomes a binding thread Wateridge uses to pull the viewer into unexpected places. And it’s this play that makes the show worth seeing. That cohesion of these specific works, pushing with and against each other, won’t be repeated for a long time, if ever.
Wateridge’s work reminds you why art matters. Not because it’s an adjunct to morality, via message, but because of a stronger impulse, a deeper, darker view of humans, a stage objectified through the act of looking. Art at its best allows the viewer to find a truth, an aesthetic, a beauty and themselves. Some Distance Apart does that. It closes the gap in our relationship with the world, it’s an argument against taking a break, a refusal of the distance that makes our solitude lonely. Breathtaking.
Jonathan Wateridge Some Distance Apart GRIMM, September 3 – October 10, 2026 43a Duke Street, St James’s, London (UK)
Exhibition Notes: Jonathan Wateridge
GRIMM is pleased to announce Some Distance Apart, a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Jonathan Wateridge, on view at the London gallery from September 3 to October 10, 2026. This will be the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery and his second at the London location.
On Thursday, 8th October, 2026 at 6.30 pm, Jonathan will be in conversation with writer Lydia Figes on the occasion of the publication of the new monograph ‘Diorama‘.
In Some Distance Apart, Wateridge melds the contemporary and the classical. Capturing moments of suspension and transition, Wateridge’s figures emerge and descend in their environments, pulsating amongst fields of colour and form. Distant interiors unfold alongside tempestuous land and seascapes, incorporating themes of the mythic and primal. The result is a painting practice grounded in anticipation – not as a metaphor, but as a palpable, physical experience that connects vision, film, memory and matter.
Motifs of a classical and hubristic nature emerge in these new works. In Diorama, an entanglement of figures is depicted in a frothing and chaos strewn seascape. Here, pigments of red, white, and Stygian black are caught mid-motion, figures forming and dissolving in real time. Together, these figures trace the origins of Wateridge’s paintings and his interest in capturing moments of tension, framing them as inflection points where uncertainty and latent tragedy quietly accumulate. The gravitational pull of the figures, whose limbs intertwine and collide across the canvas, lends the composition a quiet theatrical quality, a recurring theme in the works.
At its centre, Diorama evokes the sudden reversals of fortune that define classical tragedy, suggesting a cyclical and inescapable logic of fate. As in earlier works, Wateridge returns to these moments of suspension, where figures appear poised between the parameters of escape and entrapment, anticipation and aftermath. The exhibition’s title also evokes this paradoxical journey, capturing what Wateridge presents as moments on the verge of erasure: figures that seem at once near and distant, abstract and yet resolutely figurative. It is precisely this space between opposites that preoccupies him: a threshold where absence functions not as a revelation, but as an aperture of attention, slowing and deferring the act of looking.
In Signal, two figures are depicted calling and looking outwards towards the viewer, rendered in hues of vermilion red and orange; they occupy a nondescript space between spectrums of light and shadow, hot and cold. Their silent, voiceless gestures resemble echoes, like that of an alluring siren call. Uncertain of what they are seeking, the figures appear poised, as if on the precipice of expectation. Here, Wateridge returns to the cyclical nature of classical historical subtexts that bubble beneath his dissonant surfaces. He signals to the weight of a force much larger, a turn of fate, that much like in film or theatre, looms invisibly, permeating the stretches of time between.
In Siren, a face is bisected by a rudimentary line running across the canvas. The image is based on a film still of Dominique Sanda in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), set in Fascist Italy during the 1930s. Sanda’s character serves as a free spirited counterpoint to the male protagonist and her tragic fate is shaped by his moral compromises and cowardice. The metaphor of the mask resurfaces in Wateridge’s uncanny depiction of Sanda, and again in Persona, where an illuminated solitary figure rendered in vivid red clutches an abject mask. Elements of theatrical mirage and foreboding surface in these fragmentary compositions, inviting us to ruminate playfully on moments that hang delicately, if not fatefully, in the balance.
For Wateridge, paint has the potential to alter and mark moments in passing, a way of articulating the gaps between memory and the present. The works in this exhibition foreground the urgency of intentional looking – of tracing the shared frequencies between the classical and the contemporary, where images simultaneously fuse and fracture. The resulting paintings in Some Distance Apart emerge from these layered interactions between memory, history and space, revealing states of continual transition in which fate, anticipation and perception continually converge.
About the artist
Jonathan Wateridge (b. 1972, Lusaka, ZM) lives and works in Norfolk (UK). His work is the subject of two comprehensive monographs Uncertain Swimmer (2023) and Enclave / Expatria (2019) published by Anomie.
Selected exhibitions: No Longer, Not Yet – Paintings on Paper, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Works on Paper, Nino Mier Gallery, New York, NY (US); Vanishing Point, GRIMM, London (UK); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); Summer, Frestonian Gallery, London (UK); Afterparty, Nino Mier Gallery, New York, NY (US); Inland Water, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US); 51@51, The Rennie Museum, Vancouver (CA); This Side of Paradise, TJ Boulting, London (UK); So British! 10 Masterpieces from the Pinault Collection, Esplanade Fine Art Museum Marcel Duchamp, Rouen (FR) and Swimmer, Galerie Haas, Zurich (CH).
Selected collections include Aïshti Foundation, Jal el Dib (LB); AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Didier Casimiro, Kiev (UA); Loed Evans, London (UK); Mollie Dent Brocklehurst, London (UK); Pinault Collection, Paris (FR) and Venice (IT); Rennie Collection, Vancouver (CA); Saatchi Collection, London (UK); Simmons & Simmons, London (UK).
Bibliography
Apollo 2026, ‘Jonathan Wateridge’, Apollo, 10 February, viewed 28 September 2026, apollo-magazine.com/jonathan-wateridge-in-the-studio-interview.
FAD Magazine 2016, ‘Jonathan Wateridge’, FAD Magazine, 25 October, viewed 28 September 2026, fadmagazine.com/2016/10/25/jonathan-wateridge.
Federico, C 2010, ‘Jonathan Wateridge’, interview, Aesthetica, April, reproduced by Saatchi Gallery, viewed 28 September 2026, saatchigallery.com/artists/jonathan_wateridge_articles.htm.
Tierney, P n.d., ‘Jonathan Wateridge’, Upstate Diary, no. 20, viewed 28 September 2026, upstatediary.com/jonathan-wateridge.
Images courtesy of GRIMM, Amsterdam | London | New York and the artist © Jonathan Wateridge
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
