DANIEL CREWS-CHUBB

Crews-Chubb makes bold and vibrant works that employ a traditional, expressionistic, painterly language whist remaining utterly contemporary. He is one of a number of young painters whose work evades the distinctions between abstraction and figuration.

The paintings wrestle with the artist’s primary influences – primitive art, ancient ritual and amateur anthropology. They embody a search for the authentic, the raw and the unrefined, subtly influenced by the repetitive nature of image-led, consumer culture, Modernist painting and the history of mark-making from cave painting to abstract and neo expressionism.

They are dominated by a repeated, archetypal motif; a couple of bold and naively rendered figures, locked in ambiguous relationship; unclear as to whether they are in harmony or conflict. Articulated in strong, loose, expressionistic brush strokes, the figures are at once tribal and cartoon like.

The repetition of the figurative motif becomes a vehicle for exploring the act of painting itself, in a manner similar, perhaps, to that of Georg Baselitz, or De Kooning’s Woman series. In this joyful exploration, Crews-Chubb makes common cause with the celebration of child-like creativity that inspired Karel Appel and Asger Jorn and the strand of contemporary painting that has flowed on from them.

Crews-Chubb utilizes a repertoire of seemingly casual marks that are, in fact, worked and reworked to create hard won, layered paintings that only achieve their final form when he arrives at a sense of balance or rightness that lets him stop. He uses oils, acrylics, spray paint, sand, charcoal and pastel, with abandon on rough, stretched and re-stretched canvases, that he often scrapes back and over paints. Even in their stasis, the works carry within them the dynamism of their production.

Crews-Chubb studied at Chelsea School of Art, and Turps Art School. In October 2015, he had his first, major, solo show at Galerist, Istanbul. This is his first solo presentation in America.