About
Ian Douglass (b. Chicago, IL) is an artist and writer based in London. He works primarily in painting, drawing, and writing, sometimes spilling into sound, installation, and performance.
“I work primarily in painting, using the medium to navigate the sublime within the sinister. My paintings draw on the Vanitas tradition in its meditations on mortality and seductive entropy. But where Vanitas renders the immaterial as symbol, in candles, skulls, or bubbles, I pursue the immaterial as method. My practice gravitates around the grand theatrical ambitions of French history painting: Géricault's catastrophic bodies, Delacroix's chromatic fury, Toulouse-Lautrec's nocturnal underworlds, Redon's hallucinatory botanicals. Against these inheritances, I pit my boundary-dissolving philosophy of Psychedelic Violence: the notion that painting operates as a primal, consciousness-rupturing technology, simultaneously destructive and liberatory, collapsing the boundary between matter and the immaterial.
Central to my practice is an investigation of belief as both subject and structure. How belief performs itself, covering up its own cracks, how shadow becomes substance. Emphasising painting’s slippage between material reality and immaterial illusion, I seek a state between vision and hallucination. Painting is approached not as object but as network, where belief is generated, constantly shifting. Instead of reconciling painting's histories, I want to activate the tensions between them: high and low, sacred and profane, research and intuition, surface and depth. What emerges is less about painting's history than painting's hauntings.”
Email: fromstudiodouglass@gmail.com
Instagram: @studiodouglass
CV
Education
2021-2023
MA Painting (Distinction) • Royal College of Art • London, UK
2010-2015
BA History • Eugene Lang College the New School • New York City
BFA Industrial Design • Parsons the New School for Design • New York City
Selected Exhibitions
‘Drawings from Imperfectionism’ • October 17 - November 7, 2025 • Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles
‘A Common Longing’ (sound piece) w. Femanifesto • September 2025 • 180 The Strand, London
‘Aria of the Unheard’ • Sol de Paris • July 2025 • Le Marais, Paris
‘The State of Things (Sulphur)’ • April 4 - May 18, 2025 (solo) • Akku Kunstplatform, Lucern, Switzerland
‘Malerei’ • March- May 2025 • Akku Kunstplatform, Lucern, Switzerland
‘Sometimes a Wind Blows’ • December 2024 - January 2025 • Wonzimer, Los Angeles, USA
‘Echoes’ • July 2024 • Wonzimer x OHSH Projects • Peckham, London
‘Inbound Carousel’ • May 2024 • Galleria Objets • Brick Lane, London
‘Violent Bodies’ {Paintings and Performance} • Feb. 2024 • Femanifesto Collective at Ugly Duck • London, UK
‘Rites and Rituals’ • Feb. 2024 • Safehouse, Peckham • London, UK
‘Semantics of Love’ • May-June 2023 Danuser & Ramirez Gallery • Royal College of Art • London, UK
Chaiya Art Awards • April 2023 • London, UK
‘Good Oblivion’ • November 2022 • The Function Suite • London, UK
‘Third Floor’ • November 2022 • Royal College of Art, London, UK
‘Bordering Abstraction’ • April 2022 • Wonzimer Gallery Satellite Exhibition • London, UK
‘RAW’ • March 2022 • Soho Revue • London, UK
‘Salon of Imperfectionism’ • July 2021 • Wonzimer Gallery • Los Angeles, California
‘Beyond the Sea’ • July 2019 • Wonzimer Gallery • Los Angeles, California
‘Shrine as Graffiti’ • Residency & Site-specific Installations • October - December 2018 • Sanctuary Slimane, Marrakech, Morocco
‘Shrine of Pure Ideology and Illuminated Creatures’ March 2018 • SURVIVE! Garage • Yogyakarta, Indonesia
‘PAIN(T)KILLER’ • March 2017 • Sesama Gallery • Yogyakarta, Indonesia
‘Hallucinations from the Castle’s Prison’ • June-August 2015 • Castle Wil, Steinmann Stiftung • Bern, Switzerland (Solo + Residency)
From June through August 2015, the artist lived and worked in the now-defunct prison cells next to the Castle Wil (Schloss Wyl) in Bern Switzerland, producing paintings for exhibition in the castle’s tower, reflecting the history and unknowable past of the castle and surrounding landscape.