Julie Umerle

Julie Umerle is an American-born abstract painter who grew up in Connecticut and moved to London with her family as a young child. She lives and works in the city, and her practice centres on the materiality of paint and the processes of painting itself.

She studied French literature at the University of Sussex and fine art at Falmouth University, where she earned a first-class degree. From 1991 to 1996 she worked as an artist educator at several London galleries. She completed an MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York in 1998, and after her studies she lived and worked between London and New York for about five years before settling in London again in 2003.

Umerle works in open-ended series that explore similarity, repetition and difference. Critics have noted that her paintings exist at the meeting point of decision and accident, and the art historian Simon Morley has described a sense of suspension in them, achieved through a long process of condensation. She has received awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and from Arts Council England on several occasions, and her work is held in public and private collections. In 2019 she published her memoir, Art, Life and Everything.