Paul Nurse and other works

The National Portrait Gallery is delighted to announce the unveiling of its latest commission, a portrait of the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Sir Paul Nurse.

May – October 2008

The National Portrait Gallery is delighted to announce the unveiling of its latest commission, a portrait of the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Sir Paul Nurse, by acclaimed British artist Jason Brooks. The painting, a large-scale black and white close-up of the scientist’s face, cropped to give a cinematic effect, shows every pore, every follicle, every trace of time worn into the human face. This is the largest painting in such a realist style that the National Portrait Gallery has acquired.

To place this commission in the wider context of Brooks’s work, the portrait of Sir Paul Nurse will be displayed alongside two other portraits by the artist – a new portrait of Formula One racing driver Jenson Button, exhibited for the first time, and an earlier work entitled ‘Zoe’ taken from the ‘Tattooed’ series. All three portraits relate to Brooks’s fascination with mortality and the fugitive image: Nurse is a pioneering scientist who specialises in cancer research; Jenson Button is engaged in a death-defying sport and Zoe endures pain to decorate her body with permanent tattoos. ‘What’s really important to me,’ says Brooks ‘is having that pornographic gaze, that forensic detail. The flaws, the marks -they’re the things that I fall in love with.’

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