Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller was born on 30 March 1966 in London. He did not attend art school. Instead he studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, completing his BA in 1988, and went on to an MA in Art History at the University of Sussex in 1992, supervised by the art historian David Alan Mellor. He lives and works in London.

Deller's practice spans installation, video, performance, and print, usually built around collaboration and social history rather than studio-made objects. Early recognition came through works such as The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment project revisiting a violent clash during the 1984 to 1985 UK miners' strike, and Folk Archive, made with Alan Kane and shown at the Palais de Tokyo and the Barbican Art Gallery. In 2004 he won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket (2003), a documentary about Texas. He was included in the Hirshhorn Museum's 2008 exhibition The Cinema Effect and had a major New Museum survey in 2009, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, which also toured to the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

In 2010 he received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts. His 2012 retrospective Joy in People opened at the Hayward Gallery in London and traveled to Wiels in Brussels. In 2013 he represented Great Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale with English Magic in the British Pavilion, and the Hirshhorn presented a related solo, Directions: Jeremy Deller, in 2014. Later major projects include Sacrilege, an inflatable Stonehenge bouncy castle shown by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan in 2018, participation in Skulptur Projekte Munster in 2017, and Art is Magic, a 2023 survey across three Rennes venues. In 2026 he opened National Happiness at the Gerdarsafn Kopavogur Art Museum in Iceland and a solo show at The Modern Institute in Glasgow.

Deller is widely treated as an important figure for expanding what counts as contemporary art. The Hirshhorn Museum has cited the Financial Times as crediting him with broadening the definition of contemporary art through what it termed social surrealism. His restaging of the 1984 miners' strike, The Battle of Orgreave, was named among The Guardian's list of the best art of the twenty-first century, with critic Hettie Judah writing about its power as a work of participatory ritual, spectacle, and public memory. His Turner Prize win in 2004 and his selection to represent Great Britain at the 2013 Venice Biennale confirmed a critical consensus around him as a leading British artist working at the intersection of art, history, and public life.

The highest publicly documented auction price for a Jeremy Deller work is GBP 10,000, for Artist's impression of the Murdoch family home in Sydney, Australia on fire, sold at Sotheby's London in March 2021, though the exact day of sale is not publicly documented. Other notable results include History of the World (1998), which sold for GBP 5,376 at Bonhams in October 2023, and War on Terror (Cycles chained, noir et blanc), which sold for GBP 3,250 at Phillips. Auction data for Deller is sparse and dispersed across houses, and his secondary market is dominated by modestly priced prints and multiples, including a GBP 353 sale of Bless This Acid House at Lyon & Turnbull on 1 November 2024, rather than unique high-value works.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Jeremy Deller, and works should be verified through his current galleries, The Modern Institute, Galerie Art Concept, and Paul Stolper Gallery. His deep museum presence, including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and several French national collections, is a stronger signal of long-term standing than his auction history. Collectors should treat his auction record, currently topped at a modest GBP 10,000, as one indicator among several, since his market is better understood through accessible prints and multiples than through unique high-value works.