M+B is pleased to present City to the Sea, an exhibition of works by Bill Jacklin. This is Jacklin’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens on Saturday, May 17 with an opening reception at the gallery from 2 to 6 pm.
Over the past five decades, British-born, New York-based painter Bill Jacklin has indelibly shaped the visual language of contemporary urban life. A Royal Academician since 1991, Jacklin first emerged from the British art scene in the 1970s, making a decisive shift from abstraction to figuration—a move that would come to define his practice. Since relocating to New York in 1985, his work has been the subject of numerous institutional exhibitions, including major solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the Royal Academy of Art in London, UK. His paintings are held in the collections of the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. His commissions include: Futures Market commissioned by the Bank of England, The Rink commissioned by the Metropolitan Airport Authority (design architect César Pelli) and The Park commissioned by DeBeers London as well as others. Represented by Marlborough Gallery for much of his career, Jacklin has forged a distinctive vision—one that conjures the crowd as both subject and sensation, the city as both atmosphere and memory.
City to the Sea spans nearly four decades (1986–2025), renders the urban sublime in blurred motion, suspended light, and temporal drift. The exhibition unfolds like a dream of metropolitan life—New York’s shadowed tenements, sunlit promenades, and swelling crowds captured in atmospheric haze and ferrous tones. Here, Jacklin emerges less as a recorder of modern life than as its conjurer.
Take Meat Packers, N.Y.C. II (1987), where industrial rigor meets choreographed movement. Smokestacks and shadows structure the composition, but it’s the peripheral figures—fleeting and nearly ghostly—that signal Jacklin’s turn from figuration toward sensation. These aren’t people but pulses, sketches of labor etched into the architecture of an era. His approach bears the muscular lyricism of Futurism softened by the tonal restraint of Ashcan painting—Jacklin’s New York is a city both in motion and in memory.
This motif finds a luminous counterpoint in The Boardwalk, Coney Island (1992), a painting that teeters between celebration and entropy. Bathed in a hallucinatory Californian light that belies its East Coast setting, the figures—bathers, sun-seekers, dogs, and strollers—drift through a cotton-candy fog. The surface flickers with pastel hues and suggestive outlines, evoking an oddly ecstatic anonymity. Jacklin’s crowd scenes, whether street parades or beach ambulations, function as contemporary frescoes—scenes of collective experience that speak to urban longing, spectacle, and solitude.
Throughout the show, scale becomes a tool of choreography. Towards Empire, Fifth Avenue I (2007) and West Side Highway I (2011) present vertiginous perspectives where buildings loom like monoliths and figures dissolve into gestural notation. These works insist not on the specificity of place but on the sensation of being dwarfed, absorbed, or carried along by the currents of the city. Jacklin paints the city as if through memory’s fog, where glints of narrative remain just beyond reach.
Yet it’s in the exhibition’s quieter moments—Ark, NYC I (2023), with its lovers under a storm of snow, or The Lake and the Mountain II (2024), an uncanny seascape bathed in silver-green iridescence—that Jacklin’s hand is most reverent. These works push the city to the edge of abstraction, into weather, atmosphere, and silence. Storm Over the City II (2015) becomes a nearly Turner-esque meditation on velocity and vapor, its brushwork evoking not architecture but afterimage.
City to the Sea reads as a portrait of flux—of cities as living organisms and of painting as a form of devotion to change itself. Jacklin doesn’t depict the metropolis; he renders its temperature. His project is not documentary but atmospheric: a cartography of the invisible forces that move us, gather us, scatter us. In this way, the exhibition is less a chronology than a contemplation—on migration, congregation, and the porous border between the urban and the oceanic.
His monographs include Bill Jacklin Monotypes published by the Royal Academy in 2024, Bill Jacklin’s New York, Scala Arts Publishers 2016, Bill Jacklin Graphics Royal Academy of Art 2015 and Bill Jacklin published by Phaidon Press Limited in 1997.
Bill Jacklin (b. 1943, London, UK) attended Walthamstow School of Art from 1960 to 1961 to study graphic design, working as a graphic designer at Studio Seven, London after graduating. In 1962, he returned to his studies at Walthamstow and began studying painting. From 1964 to 1967 he enrolled in the Royal College of Art in London. Jacklin's work is in collections worldwide, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, London, England; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; British Museum, London, England; Irish Art Council, Dublin Isle of Man Arts Council, Ireland; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, England; Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Castagnola, Switzerland; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1989, Jacklin was inducted into the prestigious Royal Academy of Art, and in 1991 was elected Royal Academician. Bill Jacklin lives and works in New York, NY.