KIM Booker

Artist Profile

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”.