Jonathan Wateridge

Jonathan Wateridge was born in 1972 in Lusaka, Zambia. He left Africa for London at eighteen and later moved north to study at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s; the exact graduation year is not confirmed by primary sources. According to Apollo Magazine, he stepped away from painting for roughly fourteen years not long after leaving art school before returning to the practice that defines his career today. He now lives and works in Norfolk, United Kingdom.

Wateridge's paintings are built as staged, often theatrical tableaux, large oil canvases depicting spectral, isolated figures who blend into their surroundings. His long-running Pool series draws on his childhood in Zambia, while other bodies of work have used jungle settings, plane wrecks, and domestic interiors to explore themes of identity, cultural displacement, and the passage of time. His output has been documented in two monographs published by Anomie, Enclave / Expatria (2019) and Uncertain Swimmer (2023).

He has shown with GRIMM in Amsterdam and London and with Nino Mier Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, alongside earlier exhibitions at T.J. Boulting in London and Levy Gorvy in Los Angeles. Gallery materials also cite a 2022 presentation at the Aishti Foundation in Beirut. As of mid-2026 he has an active exhibition calendar with both of his representing galleries, including a solo show at GRIMM Amsterdam in early 2026 and a further solo show at GRIMM London planned for autumn 2026.

Wateridge has received sustained attention in the specialist and design press, including coverage in Artforum and It's Nice That, alongside gallery and interview coverage from Apollo Magazine and Upstate Diary. The consistent thread across this coverage is his use of staged, cinematic composition, large-scale oil paintings built like film sets to stage isolated or "atomised" figures within constructed environments, and a recurring interest in cultural displacement drawn from his own childhood in Zambia. No verbatim critical assessment from these outlets could be confirmed with exact wording for this profile, so none is quoted directly.

Public auction data for Wateridge is limited and not fully reconciled across sources. A specialist market article (Artmajeur) reports that his paintings have sold at auction for between roughly USD 8,750 and USD 502,146, and names his auction record as Jungle Scene With Plane Wreck, sold at Christie's London in 2012 for USD 502,146. That figure is corroborated in aggregate by MutualArt's database, which cites a peak realized price for a Wateridge painting "of up to" the same amount, though MutualArt's public summary does not itself expose the underlying lot's title, date, or sale location. A separate, similarly themed work, Jungle River Landscape with Plane Wreck, sold at Phillips London for GBP 109,250, a considerably lower figure under a related but distinct title. Collectors should treat the exact details of the top auction result as the best available reading of a single-source, specialist account rather than a fully cross-verified record.

Wateridge has no catalogue raisonne. His two published monographs document the work but function as career surveys rather than authentication tools, and verification runs through his representing galleries, GRIMM and Nino Mier Gallery. His market presence in major private collections and foundations, including the Pinault Collection, the Saatchi Collection, the Rennie Collection, and the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, is reported by his galleries, but no conventional public museum has been confirmed as holding his work in a permanent collection based on currently available sources. His auction history is real but sparse and inconsistently reported across databases, so any single price point, including the widely cited USD 502,146 record, should be weighed against the small number of public sales rather than read as a stable trend line.