Merlin James' intensively worked and generally small-scale canvases encompass a wide variety of subject matter including empty interiors, rural landscapes, architecture and, more recently,scenes of sexual intimacy. Often distressed, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted, these works refine and renew many of paintings most time-honoured concerns-genre and narrative,pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture. His apt description of the painterly project of an admired forebear, Alex Katz (James is also an accomplished and widely published critic), is equally applicable to his own practice, i.e. he continues to play the grand, complex game of Western painting while reflecting a fully contemporary consciousness of the modern and postmodern disjunctures of history and culture.
James lives and works in Glasgow. Solo exhibitions include To the Present at Kerlin Gallery (13 May-25 June 2016). Recent solo exhibitions include Long Game, Long Game at CCA Glasgow(2016): Kunstverein Freiburg (2014): Parasol Unit. London: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013): Douglas Hyde Gallery,Dublin (2012. 2015): New York Studio School (2007): Kettles Yard,Cambridge (1996)and National Gallery, Wales (1995). In 2007,James represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale.