Jonathan Freemantle at Gallery MOMO
GALLERY MOMO SPOTLIGHTS JONATHAN FREEMANTLE
Jonathan Freemantle practice treats landscape as a material condition rather than a subject to be pictured. Born in Cape Town in 1978 and now based in Edinburgh, the artist works with mountain rocks, fallen timber, natural indigo and ochre, bringing the physical substance of place into the studio.
Where earlier landscape traditions often positioned the viewer at a distance from nature, Freemantle’s approach belongs to a longer line of practice that collapses that separation. The materials are ground by hand from the sites that inform the work. The resulting paintings and sculptures carry the geological character of those places rather than representing them.
At seventeen, Jonathan was selected as one of five students worldwide for a five-year apprenticeship at St Oswald’s Academy in London, training in traditional drawing, painting, sculpture and geometry. That foundation continues to structure a practice that has been exhibited internationally since 2007. Solo presentations have taken place in London, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Johannesburg, and Edinburgh, including a major commission for the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.
“My work explores the relationship between my body, time and the earth, each of which serve as materials and as inspiration,” Freemantle has said. “I situate the body as an organic presence at one with the landscape, at the same time integrating the landscape physically in the human act of painting and sculpture.”
His relationship with Gallery MOMO includes the solo exhibitions The Fallen Tree (2024) and Spirit Matter (2022). In 2026 his work appears in Totemic at Messums Gallery, London, and in Exploded View with the Nirox Foundation and BlackBrick in Cape Town.
This year marked a significant moment in Freemantle’s career. All six works from his 2022 exhibition A Mountain is Harder to Climb Than You Think were acquired by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, and now form part of the museum’s permanent collection, alongside works by Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner and Christian Boltanski. In addition, works were acquired by 18 Michelin-star chef Yannick Alléno for his new restaurant, Pavyllon Lyon in France.
Further public and private collections holding his work include the Demarco Foundation Archive, the Nirox Foundation, and the private collection of HM King Charles III.
Freemantle has also shaped institutional contexts around him. In 2002 he established the painting department of The Art Academy in London and published Anatomy made simple for Artists in 2004. He co-founded the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival in 2012 and co-directed Hazard Gallery in Johannesburg from 2015 to 2019. Since returning to Edinburgh in 2019 he has concentrated on full-time studio practice.
“Much of my work is made as part of my attempt to deeply immerse myself in the natural world, to dissolve the line between my body and nature,” he notes. “I spend as much time as I can in forests or on the top of mountains, often grinding the rocks I find there into powder to make paint, then making a painting of the mountain, forest or field with its own substance.”
