Bill Jacklin. City to the Sea, Paintings 1986-2025

About

Over the past five decades, British-born, New York-based painter Bill Jacklin has indelibly shaped the visual language of contemporary urban life. A Royal Academician since 1991, Jacklin first emerged from the British art scene in the 1970s, making a decisive shift from abstraction to figuration—a move that would come to define his practice. Since relocating to New York in 1985, his work has been the subject of numerous institutional exhibitions, including major solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the Royal Academy of Art in London, UK. His paintings are held in the collections of the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. His commissions include: Futures Market commissioned by the Bank of England, The Rink commissioned by the Metropolitan Airport Authority (design architect César Pelli) and The Park commissioned by DeBeers London as well as others. Represented by Marlborough Gallery for much of his career, Jacklin has forged a distinctive vision—one that conjures the crowd as both subject and sensation, the city as both atmosphere and memory.

City to the Sea spans nearly four decades (1986–2025), renders the urban sublime in blurred motion, suspended light, and temporal drift. The exhibition unfolds like a dream of metropolitan life—New York’s shadowed tenements, sunlit promenades, and swelling crowds captured in atmospheric haze and ferrous tones. Here, Jacklin emerges less as a recorder of modern life than as its conjurer.