Vigo Gallery is pleased to host a solo presentation of six new works by Daniel Crews-Chubb made whilst on residency in California and influenced by recent travel in America and Mexico.
Crews-Chubb makes bold and vibrant works that employ a traditional, expressionistic, painterly language whist remaining utterly contemporary. The paintings wrestle with the artist’s primary influences – primitive art, ancient ritual, amateur anthropology and the representation of the human body within different historical contexts seen though the filter of new media. 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.
His repetition of figurative motifs becomes a vehicle for exploring the act of painting itself utilizing 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 many times.
Crews-Chubb studied at Chelsea School of Art, and Marcus Harvey’s Turps Art School. He has shown internationally in the US, UK and Turkey and will have a room dedicated to his work in the forthcoming Iconoclasts show at the Saatchi Gallery.
