Michael Pemberton (b. 1974, UK) is a painter. He lives and works in Paris.

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Over a twenty-year painting career, Pemberton has had group and solo exhibitions in galleries in London, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Vancouver.

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The first twelve years of Pemberton’s practice was largely abstract investigations. Concerns about climate change in 2005 led to his first solo exhibition of paintings, The Toxic Series, in 2006 in London.

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Over the subsequent ten years, Pemberton lived and worked in New York and Los Angeles. He explored questions of internal and external journeys, ambiguity and indefinability. These investigations resulted in abstract paintings on canvas and works on paper. Solo and group exhibitions of this work were held in 2016, 2017, 2018 at galleries in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

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In 2018, Pemberton addressed physical human form in his work. He aimed to bring about a sensation of human believability and interpretable feeling in the imaginary works without the interference of realism. The resulting works on canvas and paper were grouped into four successive series and shown at solo and group exhibitions in 2021, 2022, 2023 in galleries in Paris, Mexico City & London. In 2023, solo exhibition in London The Age of Water catalogue essay was written by a curator at Tate.

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To this day, Michael Pemberton creates self-invented works inhabiting imaginary surroundings that explore the divide between our inner and outer existences. Though centred on humans, his work links to other themes and questions whilst broadly mixing diverse art historical references.

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Michael Pemberton was educated in Fine Arts at Chelsea School of Art, London, and furthered his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College of London.