Jeremy Deller

Deller traces his broad interests in art and culture, in part, to childhood visits to museums like the Horniman Museum, in South London. After meeting Andy Warhol in 1986, Deller spent two weeks at The Factory in New York. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside of conventional galleries. In 1993, while his parents were on holiday (he was 27, still living at home), he secretly used the family home for an exhibition titled Open Bedroom. In 1997, Deller embarked on Acid Brass, a musical collaboration with the Williams Fairey Brass Band from Stockport. The project was based on fusing the music of a traditional brass band with acid house and Detroit techno. Much of Deller's work is collaborative. His work has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process. Folk Archive is a tour of "people's art" and has been exhibited throughout the UK including at Barbican Centre and most recently (2013) at The Public, West Bromwich, outside of the contemporary art institution. Much of his work is ephemeral in nature and avoids commodification. Deller staged The Battle of Orgreave in 2001, bringing together almost 1,000 people in a public re-enactment of a violent confrontation from the 1984 Miners' Strike. The re-enactment was filmed by director Mike Figgis for Artangel Media and Channel 4. The Battle of Orgreave was ranked second in The Guardian's Best Art of the 21st Century list, with critic Hettie Judah calling it a "monument of sorts, the performance was at once participatory ritual, spectacle, living archive and a space to mourn". In 2004, for the opening of Manifesta 5, the roving European Biennial of Contemporary art, Deller organised a Social Parade through the streets of the city of Donostia-San Sebastian, drafting in cadres of local alternative societies and support groups to participate.

In 2005/6, he was involved in a touring exhibit of contemporary British folk art, in collaboration with Alan Kane. In late 2006, he instigated The Bat House Project, an architectural competition open to the public for a bat house on the outskirts of London. The following year, 'Our Hobby is Depeche Mode', a documentary co-directed with Nick Abrahams about Depeche Mode fans around the world was premiered at the London Film Festival, and followed by festival screenings around the world. In 2009, Deller created Procession, a free and uniquely Mancunian parade through the centre of Manchester along Deansgate, a co-commission by Manchester International Festival and Cornerhouse. Procession worked with diverse groups of people drawn from the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester and took place on Sunday 5 July at 1400 hrs. Commissioned in 2009 as part of The Three M Project (a group composed of the New Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, LA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, to exhibit and commission new works of art), Deller created It Is What It Is. The project was designed to foster public discussion by having guest experts engage museum visitors in a free-form, unscripted dialogue about issues concerning Iraq. In 2015 the exhibition The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular was presented at MUAC in Mexico City, curated by Ferran Barenblit, Amanda de la Garza and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The exhibition traveled to Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires and Alhóndiga in Bilbao. Sacrilege, a 1:1 bouncy replica of Stonehenge

In 2007, Deller was appointed a Trustee of the Tate Gallery. Between 2012 and 2013, he served on the board of trustees of the Foundling Museum. In December 2020 Deller was part of the winning team from the Courtauld Institute of Art in Christmas University Challenge.

Deller was the winner of the Turner Prize in 2004. His show at Tate Britain included documentation on Battle of Orgreave and an installation Memory Bucket (2003), a documentary about Crawford, Texas—the hometown of George W. Bush—and the siege in nearby Waco. In 2010, he was awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) for 'creating art that encourages public responses and creativity'. The Battle of Orgreave ranked second in The Guardian's list of the best art of the 21st century, and 14th in Frieze's "25 Best Works of the 21st Century".

On 1 October 2010, in an open letter to the British Government's culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, co-signed by 28 former Turner Prize nominees, and 18 winners, Deller opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts. In the letter the co-signatories described the arts in Britain as a "remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity". In August 2014, Deller was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. During the 2017 general election campaign he created a poster bearing the words "Strong and stable my arse", referring to Theresa May's election slogan, copies of which were publicly posted around London.

Unconvention, Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff, 1999 After the Goldrush, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2002 Folk Archive: contemporary popular art from the UK with Alan Kane, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2005 Jeremy Deller, Kunstverein, Munich, 2005 From One Revolution to Another, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2008 It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, Creative Time and New Museum, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2009 Procession, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2009 Joy in People, a retrospective, Hayward Gallery, London, February–May 2012. Art is Magic, a retrospective, Rennes Museum of Fine Arts, Rennes; La Criée contemporary art center; Frac Bretagne Fonds régional d'art contemporain, France, 2023

EASTinternational, selected by Marian Goodman and Giuseppe Penone, 1995 EASTinternational, 2006 with Dirk Snauwaert Deller was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013.