No Rest for the Wicked (2025) is the latest painting on display from the artist Isabelle Brourman, known for sketching courtroom portraits of high-profile defendants like President Donald Trump, Johnny Depp and Luigi Mangione. This year, Brourman began staking out courtrooms across the country to document the Trump administration’s brutal crackdown on immigrants, drawing the appearances and arrests of individuals inside the courtroom.
“Even if each day was a little different, there was this haunting of what you had already seen that began to inform my work,” Brourman says. She calls No Rest for the Wicked “a synthesis of what I’ve seen, this haunting anchored into the Everglades”. The painting is part of the show The Body is the Body, curated by Simon Brewer and Nathalie Martin and staged at the Rice Hotel, a once-abandoned building in downtown Miami that is now renovated and operating as an art studio and exhibition space.
Brourman painted No Rest for the Wicked in the southwest Florida, the site of the detention facility nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. The human-rights group Amnesty International said in a report this week that detainees there and at Krome Detention Center in Miami are subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
The influences of South Florida are apparent in No Rest for the Wicked. Brourman painted an alligator in the centre of the work and water throughout; a face in profile resembling Trump’s, almost as if carved into Mount Rushmore; a depiction of a friend wearing an Irish-flag balaclava, meant to represent a figure of resistance; and weeping, constricted figures.
