Sebastian Jefford

The importance of routine, 2025 Pen on paper 29.7 x 63 cm Framed: 31 x 64 cm Sebastian Jefford’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting, writing and video, yet his open-ended approach often yields hybrid forms that elude categorisation. Working with recurring materials and repurposed everyday objects, his pieces frequently carry the uncanny familiarity of scaled-up miniatures or pseudo-functional props—objects that might belong to some alternate educational display or speculative world-building model. The drawings in the exhibition competence and decency unfold across panels like silent comics or instructional diagrams, alluding to a kind of narrative or logic that never fully resolves. Humor and unease coexist in these works, which lean into slapstick, satire and pathos while probing the edges of contemporary subjectivity. Rooted in a visual language that borrows from cartoons, caricature, educational diagrams and speculative design, Jefford’s practice opens up a world of ambivalent characters and half-familiar gestures. At once grotesque and gentle, comic and critical, the works channel the fragmentary psyche of a society caught between infantilisation, overstimulation and political inertia. In Jefford’s universe, imagination is not a form of escape but of entanglement—a way of making sense of the nonsense, of slipping between surfaces and re-emerging with something oddly tangible. Sebastian Jefford (b. 1991, Swansea, Wales) lives and works in London and Berlin. Selected recent and upcoming exhibitions include: The Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA (2026), Neuer Kunstverein Vienna, AT (2026), Toy, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, DE (2025), Amid The Alien Corn, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin DE (2023), The Living Worlds of Animals, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, AT, Sentiment, Sediment, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger NO (2022), Des champs de fraises pour l’éternité, La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec (2022); Natural Gas, Liebaert Projects, Kortrijk (2021); Severance, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2021); Invitation to Love, Kunstverein Bremerhaven (2020); This Margin Will Be Your Vantage Point, In Situ Fabienne Leclerc, Paris (2020); This Tragedy, Fonda, Leipzig (2020); the Lyon Biennale (2019); V22 Young London, V22 Foundation, London (2018); Doors of Paradise, Union Pacific, London (2018); Procrustean Flatulence, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2018); The Sleeping Procession, CASS Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood (2017); RA Schools Degree Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Romancing the Biscuit, Lockup International, London (2017); A Rose Is without a ‘Why.’ It Blooms Because It Blooms, Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2016); Modest Villa Immense Versailles, Kinman Gallery, London (2016); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, The Bluecoat, Liverpool + ICA, London (2016); Qwaypurlake, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton (2015).