Marking the 5th anniversary of Marie Jose Gallery, we are delighted to present Beau Regard, the first solo exhibition of Jonathan Rockefeller.

Beau Regard is an exhibition about looking, and the pleasure of being allowed to look. The title plays on two meanings: a beautiful view, and a beautiful gaze. Across Rockefeller’s paintings, pools shimmer beneath impossible skies, landscapes stretch towards the horizon, and figures linger in moments of solitude, intimacy and desire.

The figures in these paintings never look back at us. They gaze across the water, towards one another, or somewhere beyond the frame. We become voyeurs: close enough to watch, but never quite close enough to know. Rockefeller is a born storyteller, but he knows when to leave the story untold. Desire and imagination occupy the space between what is seen and what is withheld.

Rockefeller’s painterly language is distinctly his own, while drawing from the masters who came before him. His neo-Fauvist sensibility recalls the luminous colour and expressive marks of Derain; his bold, block-like passages of paint evoke de Staël; while his fascination with pools recalls Hockney. These influences converge in a visual language that is contemporary, cinematic, and immediately recognisable.

Rockefeller came to painting through film. He spent his formative years as an apprentice to Baz Luhrmann before spending a decade directing animation. His hand-drawn short A Little Death premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. His cinematic sensibility remains embedded in his paintings: in their framing, pacing and atmosphere, and in their sense of narrative continuing beyond the edge of the canvas.

Born in Australia, Rockefeller is now based between New York and London. Beau Regard marks his first solo exhibition in London, bringing together a body of work that moves between the languid, the voyeuristic and the quietly erotic - paintings that invite us to look, linger, and indulge.

Jonathan Rockefeller paints swimming pools at midday, his little brother scoffing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, dreamy petrol stations, roadside vacation scapes, and figures caught mid-turn: the everyday tipped just slightly into the strange. In oils and acrylics he threads personal history through imagined narrative, making images that behave less like paintings than like scenes, theatrical and luminous, each holding a story just out of frame. In sculpture the same instinct reworks the natural world into invented forms, abstracting coral reefs into walkable underwater gardens and cacti into fictional species no field guide would recognize. The lineage of Post-Impressionist color and contemporary figuration is there in the flattened palette and the pared-down clarity, but the temperament is his own. He is a storyteller first.

His paintings and sculptures have been shown in group exhibitions and are held in private collections across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His work has been selected for the Well Hung Gallery painting prize and Sculpture by the Sea, and installed at the Perth Sculpture Park, and upcoming solo exhibitions open in London in October 2026 and New York in 2027.

That sensibility was formed on the screen as much as in the studio. Rockefeller came up in the high-gloss, pre-digital heyday of advertising, when an idea had to be distilled into a single arresting image. Then he picked up a camera. As a self-taught filmmaker he earned early recognition for Boy From the Blue Room, a documentary as hard-boiled as it is hauntingly beautiful, shot among the homeless and the sex workers of Sydney’s Darlinghurst. Formal film study followed, and then several formative years in Baz Luhrmann’s creative orbit, an apprenticeship that sharpened his appetite for heightened, image-driven storytelling. A decade of directing and producing music videos and commercials came next. His focus now includes animation: A Little Death, hand-drawn and selected to premiere at the Annecy Film Festival, is his first feature and is currently in production.

The same instinct to build worlds by hand has reached audiences on a global scale. Through Rockefeller Studios, his theatrical work is renowned for inventive puppetry and painterly, handcrafted worlds. It includes The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show, now in its twelfth year and the most-performed children’s stage show in the world, alongside acclaimed stagings of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh and Sesame Street. Staged in more than 80 productions across 23 countries and seen by millions, these shows have grossed over $350 million worldwide and earned two New York Times Critics’ Picks, multiple BroadwayWorld Awards, and Drama Desk nominations.

A man who made Diet Coke commercials, the most-beloved children’s entertainment in the world, and a hand-drawn film about mortality is not the obvious sum of his parts. But across canvas, screen, and stage it is one restless instinct at work: to build cinematic worlds by hand, and pull an audience inside them. Born in Australia, he divides his time between New York and London.

SELECTED WORKS