Jeremy Deller (b. 1966, London) is a British artist, known for his work with video, installation and performances. He produced The Triumph of Art, a nationwide performance that closed the National Gallery’s Bicentenary celebrations in 2025, in partnership with galleries, theatre groups and art schools across the UK. He celebrated the role of art in civic life, as a driver for festivity and community. He created the Manod Slate Tablet as part of this project to commemorate the time when the nation’s paintings were sent to Manod Quarry in North Wales for safe keeping during the Second World War.
Deller studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries. In 1993, while his parents were on holiday, he secretly used the family home for an exhibition titled Open Bedroom. Four years later, he produced the musical performance Acid Brass with the Williams-Fairey Band and began making art in collaboration with other people. In 2000, with fellow artist Alan Kane, Deller began a collection of items that illustrate the passions and pastimes of people from across Britain and the social classes. Treading a fine line between art and anthropology, Folk Archive is a collection of objects which touch on diverse subjects such as Morris Dancing, gurning competitions and political demonstrations. The Folk Archive became part of the British Council Collection in 2007.
The Battle of Orgreave in 2001, was commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4, and directed by Mike Figgis. The work involved a re-enactment which brought together around a thousand veteran miners and members of historical societies to restage the 1984 clash between miners and police in Orgreave, Yorkshire. In 2004, Deller won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket (2003), a documentary about Texas. He has since made several documentaries on subjects ranging from the wrestler ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street to the die-hard international fan base of the band Depeche Mode.
During the summer of 2012 Sacrilege, Deller’s life-size interactive inflatable version of Stonehenge – a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London – toured around the UK to great public acclaim. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2003 and in 2013, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled English Magic. In 2016, his performance We’re Here Because We’re Here took place in public spaces across the country and was commissioned in memory of the First World War. Deller published Art is Magic in 2023, a book that documents key works in his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired him.
