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Artist

Jonathan Parsons

Jonathan
Chromaticity (1), 2016 by Jonathan Parsons

Jonathan Parsons was born in 1970 in Redhill, England and works in London. He gained his BA from Goldsmiths in 1992 and his PhD from the University of Gloucestershire in 2022. He has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, as well as producing several public art commissions including architectural works, flag pieces and land art. He is known for the diversity of his practice, which includes installation, sculpture, found objects, drawing, painting and fabrication. His work embodies shared sensory experiences and the commonality of forms that arise throughout global culture, with a particular emphasis on seeing, pattern recognition and the legibility and meaning of texts, signs and visual communication systems. He uses a variety of given image-sources, such as fonts, flags, maps, found gestural marks and configuration patterns and converts them into physical artworks that attempt to disrupt visual expectation in order to stimulate attentive engagement. His work explores how the personal can become communal and demonstrates his desire to understand the complexity of optical sensation and the processes of vision.

Parsons was one of the youngest artists to be included in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. His flag piece Achrome (1994) was also selected for the show, but it was banned from display by the RA and the exhibition later toured to Berlin and New York without the inclusion of the flag piece. Achrome (1994) was later acquired by the Arts Council Collection and was selected for the British Art Show 5 in 2000. Parsons has also worked on commissions for the UK Government Art Collection and co-curated an exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate in 2016.

His work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, UK, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, The Jerwood Foundation and the London Transport Museum. His solo exhibitions include: Heiligenschein, Coleman Projects, London (2024), The Black Drawings, Bunker Gallery, Isle of Wight (2022), Scribble and the Structures of Depiction, Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham (2021), New Paintings, New Art Projects, London (2014), Zed’s Dead, Loewe Contemporary, London (2012), Light, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (2008) and Graffiti, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2005).