James Nares is a British-born artist living and working in New York. His multi-media practice informs a unique approach to themes relating to movement, gravity and the unfolding of time. Nares is best known for paintings of brushstrokes that interrupt an otherwise monochromatic background. Inspired by the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Nares emphasizes gesture and the movement of the paint on the canvas and focuses on precision to relentlessly achieve the sense of weightlessness he desires.
“I kind of stripped [painting] down for myself to the things that seemed most important A lot of it had to do with reinventing the brush, the surface, and the paint. It’s those three things that I kind of came up with my own versions of, or my own mixtures of. They’re pretty simple, the ingredients to my paintings. I like to think of it as like making bread or something. A little change in the recipe and you get something completely different” (“James Nares,” interview by Glenn O’Brien, Interview, 23 November 2008).
James Nares has been granted solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Milwaukee Art Museum and his works form part of the collections of recognized institutions such as the Albright Knox Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.