Ivan Seal British, b. 1973

Ivan Seal (b. 1973, Stockport, United Kingdom) is a painter and sound artist based in Berlin. His practice explores the excavation of memory and imagination, translating internal experience into painting and sound. Working primarily in oil on canvas, Seal creates imagined interiors, still lifes, and abstract tableaux that emerge from recollection and affect rather than direct observation. His works often appear as fragments of conversations, objects, or rooms—reassembled in the space between presence and absence, memory and its erasure.

Seal’s paintings are characterised by rich impasto surfaces and a play between construction and dissolution. Forms hover at the edge of recognition, frequently set against dark, indeterminate grounds where they drift, distort, and re-materialise. In parallel with his visual work, Seal produces sound-based projects that engage with computer-generated language and sonic atmospheres, extending his investigation into memory, fragmentation, and the uncanny.

Ivan Seal is well-known for creating the album covers for The Caretaker’s oeuvre which explores cultural time, memory and its loss in the social context of Alzheimer's syndrome and dementia. Presentations of this work in sound and image have ranged from the Barbican in London, to Lincoln Center in New York and in Seoul, South Korea at the Podo Museum.

Solo exhibitions include Grottoesque, Alma Pearl, London (2025); against the day after before, The Hole, New York (2024); Today Rots Through Tomorrow, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); IVAN SEAL + THE CARETAKER: everywhere, an empty bliss, FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2019); and In Here Stands It, Spike Island, Bristol (2012). Group exhibitions include Polyphonic Views, Funkhaus Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2025); Perhaps Sunny Days, PODO Museum, Seogwipo, South Korea (2024); Polireality, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2023); Positions, Alma Pearl, London (2023); Three Rooms, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK (2021); and Background/Foreground, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2016).  

Ivan Seal’s work is held in notable collections including: FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Government Art Collection, London, UK; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Musées de Montbéliard, France; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK; PODO Museum, Seogwipo, South Korea; and the UBS Art Collection, London, UK, among others.