Irving Gallery is delighted to present a solo show by Jo Berry. Jo Berry was the winner of the 2025 Irving Open Prize, when Jo was one of 37 exhibited artists who were selected from over 370 by the 2025 co-judges artists Kate Shooter and Henry Ward, and Irving Gallery's Vanessa Lacey.

Jo Berry is a painter living and working in Cardiff, Wales, UK. She is a graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University with an BA in Fine Art (Painting). She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, including the John Moores Painting Prize, Liverpool, The Saatchi Gallery London, The National Eisteddfod of Wales and Salford Museum and Art Gallery. She has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the prestigious Jackson’s Painting Prize in 2024 and 2025, and the MADE Solo Art Prize.

Jo Berry’s paintings are in dialogue with the status of the image today and what is going on in the world viewed through screens. Recent work directly references her painting process, using an airbrush and compressor, by making paintings of smoke machines which themselves generate clouds of vapour. Many of these are on display at ‘Shadow Mirror’. Some of the paintings are based on smoke machine imagery found on the internet, a common source of imagery in Jo’s work. Other paintings originate from a series of site-specific photos she took using a rented smoke machine in landscapes of former illegal raves from the late eighties and early nineties, near the M4 and M25 corridors.

Jo’s interest in the found image reveals itself in the series of paintings she has made from film stills – often landscapes transformed into otherworldly spaces though the process of duplication – photography, printing, and then painting with an airbrush on canvas. The visual qualities under investigation in her paintings tend to be underexposure, blurring and misregistered colour as an already corrupted image becomes further removed from its original source through this process. There is often a deliberate attempt to retain the digital origin of the image.