Jim Naughten

Jim Naughten is a British artist who interrogates our vital, if often strained, relationship with the Natural World through enhanced and manipulated photographic images of great technical virtuosity.

He has achieved an international reputation for his work – often collaborating with leading ecologists and conservationists. His 2023 exhibition, Mesozoic was endorsed – and inspired – by the ground-breaking zoologist, Jane Goodall.  

In his most recent body of work, Biophilia (2025), Naughten deployed an AI imaging tool, together with his own stock of images of historic dioramas, and the possibilities of digital manipulation, to refashion the familiar. He created images of ‘animals’ that are, by turns, unsettling and beguiling: there are brightly coloured monkeys, pink-tinged zebras and improbably crested birds.

Naughten’s work plays both with our anxieties about the impact of the modern world upon the natural realm, and the extent to which our feelings for that realm are founded upon nostalgic memory and imagination. His art uses the most modern methods, and addresses contemporary concerns, but it also reaches back to the very core of existence: man’s place in Nature. 

Jim Naughten studied at the Arts Institute of Bournemouth. His work has been exhibited internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Horniman Museum, and the Imperial War Museum, London. He has also exhibited at the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery, London.  His work is held in museum collections in both the UK and US, including the Wellcome Collection, London, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida.