Jamie Bragg’s (b. 2001, Watford) paintings probe the uneasy space where private memory collides with collective history. He works from an ever-evolving archive of found and inherited photographs, most recently, images taken by his great-grandfather during his military service in North Africa and the Levant. Bragg translates these artefacts into quiet, pastel compositions that oscillate between delicate intimacy and unease. For Bragg, these works function as both gestures of care and acts of confrontation, situating tenderness and violence in fragile proximity.

Bragg’s process begins with digital collage. Photographic sources are fused and re-formed into new, dislocated compositions that strip the images of their original context. Slowly, these are then rendered with a focus on tactility: pigment is layered, paint sprayed, scumbled, scratched, and wiped back to create an enticing surface. The act of looking is intentionally slowed. Through this seductive handling of paint and colour, he amplifies the tension between the compositions’ formal beauty and the disturbing legacies that they hold.

Within his canvases, Bragg reframes family photographs, not as neutral fragments of the past, but as charged sites in which grief, nostalgia, intimacy, and complicity converge and endure.

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 Gathering, Ibiza (2025), 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 The Platform Graduate Award, Oxford, UK (2024) and was the winner of The Oxford Review of Books Art Prize Spring Edition, Oxford, UK (2024). He is set to have a solo show at Gathering's Glasshouse space this Autumn.