British artist Daniel Crews-Chubb is known for his experimental collage, which consists of materials such as paint, spray paint, sand, charcoal, and pastel. Drawing from an array of sources across Modernist painting and social media, Crews-Chubb creates heavily layered, abstracted, and expressive canvases.
Read MoreCrews-Chubb often works on several canvases at once, building up their surfaces using both paint and materials that are not commonly associated with painting. The tangibility of his canvases reflect the physical nature of Crews-Chubb's practice, which involves the laborious layering of paint and materials on the canvas. In works such as Dancing Yetis and Venus Blue (both 2020), the roughness of charcoal, frayed ends of fabric, and thick texture of hardened paint are visible to the bare eye.
The semi-figurative paintings of Crews-Chubb draw largely from symbols and archetypes familiar across different cultures, including mythical entities, animals, motifs of nature, the human nude, and chariots. Figures are often reduced to simple forms with exaggerated features, appearing as totemic heads in paintings such as Head With Serpents (green pink blue) (2020). Painted repeatedly with forceful, expressive lines, Crews-Chubb's protagonists also suggest the artist's interest in the act of painting.
Participating in Frieze Online 2020, Crews-Chubb engaged with still life, with his gallery presenting paintings of flowers inspired by Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. In an interview with Timothy Taylor, the artist said, 'I wanted to see if I could make it my own,' commenting on the age-old tradition that is still life.
In Flowers (Midnight Blue) (2020), Crews-Chubb depicts a vase of flowers as the central focus of the canvas, much like Van Gogh's sunflowers, but rendered in his characteristic use of dynamic slabs of paint.
The range of motifs that frequent Crews-Chubb's canvases came together in Chariots, Beasts and Belfies, his 2018 solo exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. Chariot (red orange green) (2018), a large horizontal work, shows a profile of chariot being led by a horse and what appears to be a black lion. In Belfie (green and pink) (2018), a nude woman with contorted and exaggerated body features evokes the women in Willem de Kooning's paintings.
Selected solo exhibitions include Solitary Us; Couple paintings, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2021); The Consequences of Play, Wellington Arch, London (2021); Flowers, Choi&Lager Gallery, Seoul (2021); Cave Continuum, Timothy Taylor, New York (2020); Daniel Crews-Chubb, Art021 Shanghai (2019); Zeus, Zona Maco, Mexico City (2019); and Zumbi and Belfie, Galerist, Istanbul (2015).
Group exhibitions include Something Happened, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai (2020); Synchronicity, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2020); Telescope, Hastings Contemporary, U.K. (2019); The Bunker (Beth Rudin De Woody's private collection), West Palm Beach, U.S.A. (2017); ICONOCLASTS, Art out of the Mainstream, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); and The Fantasy of Representation, Beers London (2015).
The artist's website can be found here and his Instagram account can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
