Ellipsis Prints
Portrait of the artist Kim Booker

Artist · Collection Two · 2021

Prints by Kim Booker

Kim Booker is a painter whose work navigates the tension between defiance and beauty. Through gestural brushwork, saturated colour and a deliberate embrace of awkwardness, Booker constructs compositions that feel charged and unresolved, poised between refinement and disruption.

Kim Booker’s practice engages directly with the legacy of Western art history, not as passive inheritance but as material to be reworked and reclaimed. She has described painting as a way of taking space — inserting herself into a canon historically shaped by exclusion. The resulting works resist polish in favour of friction, allowing vulnerability and confrontation to remain visible.

Kim Booker completed her BA at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2019. Since graduating, she has established a growing international exhibition profile, with solo exhibitions including The Sadness of Beautiful Things at Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2024); I Want to Live Twice at Bo Lee & Workman, Somerset (2023); and no-man’s-land at JARILAGER Gallery, Cologne (2023).

Alongside these solo projects, her work has been included in international group exhibitions in Seoul and Milan, reflecting an expanding European and international presence.

Across her practice, Kim Booker continues to test how painting can remain sensuous while refusing complacency — holding awkwardness and beauty in productive tension. “In each work I strive to achieve a certain awkwardness that arises from the conflict between an impulse for defiance and a desire for beauty”.

Recently, Kim Booker presented Flowers Still Bloom at Bo Lee Gallery in Bruton, Somerset, from 19 September to 24 October 2026. The new paintings reflected on the threatened living world, allowing human figures to merge with dense vegetation and sweeping passages of colour. Accompanied by an essay by writer and historian Catherine McCormack, the exhibition considered nature’s resilience and capacity for renewal alongside its vulnerability.

“Kim's paintings combine expressive mark-making with an unconventional approach to colour and composition. There is a deliberate tension between beauty and awkwardness, and an energy that resists easy resolution.”

Kate Neave, Curator