Jamie Nares is a British-born artist best known for her innovative work that spans painting, film, performance, and photography.
She is especially renowned for her large-scale gestural paintings, created with a single, fluid brushstroke that captures motion, time, and intention in a single, suspended gesture. These works blend calligraphy, minimalism, and performance, and often involve specially designed tools to apply paint in sweeping, elegant arcs.
Nares's art is included in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. A transgender woman, she has spoken openly about identity and expression, and continues to be a vital and dynamic voice in contemporary art.
Three Aces continues the investigation Nares is renowned for – her exploration of movement, gesture and time. Each print features a unique, powerful brushstroke that records a single, fluid gesture. While her work may look like unmediated and spontaneous compositions, brushstroke paintings are more often the painstaking result of a repeatedly rehearsed movement that Nares executes as she travels the length of the canvas - sweeping and twisting the brush as she goes. She begins each one with an intention or gesture in mind and will make however many passes at the canvas are necessary to get it right—a process that can sometimes take a full day or more.
In the 1980s painting became an increasingly important aspect of Nares’s practice, and she began crafting her own brushes, whose filaments and feathers have been chosen for their unique mark-making qualities - achieving an extraordinary result: singular monumental brushstrokes with gestural energy and exacting detail. Nares has been collaborating with Durham Press since the early 2000s, producing screen prints with her signature, large-scale brushstrokes.