Jonathan Yeo
Jonathan Yeo is a British contemporary artist who specializes in both traditional and experimental forms of portraiture. His most celebrated paintings include King Charles III, Malala Yousafzai, Sir David Attenborough, Dennis Hopper, and Cara Delevingne, among others. GQ described him as "one of the world's most in-demand portraitists."
Yeo's work has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2013, The Lowry, Manchester in 2014, the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 2015, the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark in 2016 and , Barnard Castle in 2018.
In 2007, his unauthorised portrait of American president George W. Bush, created from cuttings of pornographic magazines and shown in London, New York and Los Angeles, brought him worldwide notoriety.
Yeo was the subject of a BBC Culture Show Special in September 2013, and a BBC Maestro course in 'Portrait Painting' in 2024 The monograph The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo, featuring works from throughout his career, was published by London-based publisher Art/Books in the same month. His paintings are included within the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, The Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Collection.
In 2018 Yeo was appointed as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London for four years and was reappointed in 2022 for a second term.
He was also awarded GQ Artist of the Year in 2018 which was presented to him by Baroness Doreen Lawrence.
Early life and education
Yeo was born in London in 1970, to Tim Yeo, a Conservative MP and was educated at Westminster School. He first tried oil painting at the age of 14, encouraged by his grandmother.Prior to beginning his career as an artist he studied English & Film Studies at the University of Kent. In his third year he received treatment for Hodgkin's disease.
Yeo is a self-taught artist whose earliest influences stemmed from the work of cubist painters Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque and British artists, David Bomberg, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud and Euan Uglow.
In 2017 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Art from the University of Kent.
Career
Portraiture
In 1993, while undergoing chemotherapy, he made his first significant career breakthrough completing a portrait commission of Trevor Huddleston, the famous anti-apartheid campaigner.Yeo was commissioned by the House of Commons as the official Election Artist for the 2001 general election, and he painted the leaders of the three largest parties. His triptych of Tony Blair, William Hague, and Charles Kennedy, entitled, 'Proportional Representation', had a conceptual element being made up of canvases sized according to the subjects' share of the vote. “Proportional Representation was his political debut and a response to the media-saturated general election of 2001.” Tim Marlow
Through the 2000s, he became known for his contemporary realist portraits of well-known figures. His subjects include the artists Sir Peter Blake and Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, Savile Row taylor Ozwald Boateng, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Camilla, Former Apple Chief Design Officer Sir Jony Ive, actors Helena Bonham Carter, Jude Law, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily Cole, Nicole Kidman, Giancarlo Esposito, Taron Egerton and Sophia Loren, the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. In 2005, his portrait of Erin O'Connor was used to advertise London's National Portrait Gallery around the world. The painting was used as the front cover of '500 Portraits', a survey of the BP Portrait prize published in 2011.
In January 2008, Yeo's official portrait of former prime minister Tony Blair was unveiled and struck a public chord with its clear Iraq war reference. It showed an older and wearier-looking Blair wearing a red poppy – a symbol of war remembrance for the British. In line with the political subjects that have featured throughout his work, in 2009, Yeo painted a full-length portrait of David Cameron just before his election to Prime Minister, which was sold at auction in 2010 for £200,000.
In April 2011, Queen Elizabeth II commissioned Yeo to paint a portrait of David Attenborough for the Royal Collection.
'Jonathan Yeo Portraits' at the National Portrait Gallery, London included a selection of new and older works by Yeo. The new portraits included individuals who have made a significant mark on their field of expertise, including: the arts, theatre, and politics. Sitters include Doreen Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Damien Hirst, Malala Yousafzai, and Grayson Perry and Idris Elba.
Between 2010 and 2012, Yeo created works based on cosmetic surgery procedures. He presents the faces of women in pre and post-operative states, as a counterpoint to the traditional portrait. This collection of paintings was the subject of two solo exhibitions, 'You're Only Young Twice' at Lazarides in London and ‘ Under My Skin' at Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin .
'Jonathan Yeo Portraits' at the National Portrait Gallery, London included a selection of new and older works by Yeo. The new portraits included individuals who have made a significant mark on their field of expertise, including: the arts, theatre, and politics. Sitters include Doreen Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Damien Hirst, Malala Yousafzai, and Grayson Perry.
In 2014, the exhibition was expanded at The Lowry in Salford where additional portraits were painted representing the city of Manchester including Maxine Peake and John Cooper Clarke. In 2015 it was expanded further at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle where new paintings included a portrait of Queen Camilla.
Yeo’s first major international retrospective opened at the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark in March 2016. Alongside 47 existing works, a new series of paintings of the actor and model Cara Delevingne was unveiled at the museum as part of the exhibition. This series of portraits was made over an eighteen-month period and is concerned with image making and performed identity. Yeo said: "the way we manipulate and read self-portrait images, or 'selfies', in the last five years has far more in common with the activity of the 16th-century portrait artists and audiences than any art movement since the birth of photography". A portrait of the former Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was also unveiled at the opening of this exhibition and will remain at the museum as part of its permanent collection. A new monograph, titled 'In The Flesh' was published by the museum to accompany the show where the primary text was written by British Art historian, Richard Cork.
In February 2016, Yeo's portrait of the actor Kevin Spacey in the role of President Francis J. Underwood, from the Netflix series House of Cards, was unveiled at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Spacey unveiled the painting in character as the fictional President Underwood, joking "I'm pleased the Smithsonian continues to prove itself as a worthwhile institution. I'm one step closer to convincing the rest of the country that I am the president." Netflix made a short film of the collaboration between the museum, actor, and artist to promote the fourth season of House of Cards, which premiered that same evening.
In May 2024, Yeo's portrait of King Charles III, His Majesty King Charles III, was unveiled at Buckingham Palace and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon online, “the painting that “sparked a million memes". The portrait, which was painted between June 2021 and November 2023, a period encompassing Charles' accession to the throne, was the first official portrait of the King since his coronation. Measuring about 8 feet 6 inches by 6 feet 6 inches in its frame, the work is in a vivid red and shows Charles in the uniform of the Welsh Guards. The BBC described it as "a vibrant painting", and Queen Camilla reportedly told Yeo approvingly: "Yes, you've got him."
Pornographic Collage
The Pornographic Collage Series was a sudden departure by Yeo from paint into collage, with the first of these unorthodox works being the portrait titled Bush, which was made in 2007 after an official commission to paint the then President of the United States, George W. Bush, fell through. Yeo's initial frustration led him to making this playful but explicit, collage satirizing the assumed moral superiority of the extreme right in American politics.The use of clippings from hardcore pornographic magazines as the medium, instead of paint on canvas, gave a humorous and subversive edge to the works. This series, initially known as his ‘Blue Period’, with an exhibition of the same title opening in 2008 at Lazarides Gallery in Soho, saw him depict subjects as diverse as the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and portrait painter Lucian Freud; whose fleshy reworking of his famous self-portrait can be seen as a tongue-in-cheek passing of the torch between generations.
“In Yeo’s work, magazine cuttings are used in a similar way to paint. They often become abstract – though pornographic details do rear their provocative heads. They are placed to echo brushstrokes and slabs of colour. The skin-toned paper shapes make the body appear almost sculptural, like the paintings of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville or even Cubism. The pictures look more finished and painterly than rough-and-ready cut and paste,” Francesca Gavin – Cutting Illusions 2008.
Unlike any of Yeo's painted portraits, none of the subjects of Yeo's collage works are a result of any personal connection with the artist. Rather they are based on the subject's public reputations and, whether rightly or wrongly, they are understood to have traded on their sexuality, nudity or their attitudes towards morality, which is now inseparable from their public image.
The series was further developed into a larger exhibition of the collages, ‘Porn in the USA’ which opened in West Hollywood, USA in July 2010 and included new portraits including Tiger Woods, Sean Connery, Paris Hilton, Sarah Palin and Sigmund Freud alongside a series of decorative wallpaper also made from pornography.