Jamie Bragg is a UK based artist, whose practice seeks to explore the intersection between photographic and painterly modes of image-making. Embracing his generation's easy relationship to the photographic image, Bragg exclusively works from pre-existing imagery, culled from sources such as family photographs and online references. His paintings intricately blend quotidian subject matter with personal experience, splicing together individual and collective memories to capture the tender intricacies of mundane life. Through his layered and scratched application of pigment, Bragg explores ideas of identity, grief, isolation and desire.

Bragg brutally crops many of his compositions, stripping his photographic referent of any context, recognisable narrative or didactic function. By allowing the image to fade away from easy perception, Bragg’s paintings vibrate between coherence and illegibility, exploring an image's power to simultaneously assert and withhold. More recently, Bragg has been working from a series of photographs taken by his great-grandfather while he was a serviceman stationed in North Africa and the Levant. At once dark and luminous, the compositions ranging from serene pastel landscapes of grazing cows to endearing scenes of comradeship are somewhat otherworldly. These tender re-imaginings simultaneously entice and repel, awkwardly pitting the violent and problematic context of the original photographs against the somewhat alluring nature of a painted image. Within these compositions, the archive becomes a site for introspection, exploring family relationships, heritage, ideas of masculinity and the ways we as private individuals might be complicit in larger political narratives of exploitation.

Bragg graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2024, where he was the winner of the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize, selected by Sir Nicholas Serota and Joy Labinjo. Bragg has exhibited at Modern Art Oxford (2024) and The Dolphin Gallery, Oxford (2024). Bragg was nominated for LUX Next Gen Masters: The Bicester Village x LUX Magazine (2024) and was the winner of The Oxford Review of Books Art Prize Spring Edition, Oxford, UK (2024); Platform Graduate Award nominee, Oxford, UK (2024) and the winner of the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize, Oxford, UK (2024).