Frieze London 2025: Daniel Crews-Chubb

Timothy Taylor is pleased to participate in the 2025 edition of Frieze London this October with a solo booth of new work by Daniel Crews-Chubb. The presentation marks the debut of the artist's sculptural practice, shown alongside new paintings from both his ongoing and recent series. Together, these works offer a meditation on the tensions between figuration and abstraction, beauty and ugliness, order and disarray.

Expanding his distinctive visual language into three dimensions, Crews-Chubb introduces a group of large-scale sculptures made from plaster and wood, finished with bold and playfully applied patinas that echo the material density and improvisational energy of his paintings. The Guardians series—three commanding figures rising from heavily worked found-wood bases—draws on archetypes of the protector across cultures and time: mythic deities, ceremonial totems, and sacred sentinels. Simultaneously timeless and deliberately decontextualised, these figures resist fixed identity, their worn, eroded surfaces evoking artefacts weathered by time. As with his painting practice, the artist builds intuitively, allowing forms to emerge through a process of accumulation and abrasion, revealing a raw, almost primordial presence within the material. Shown in tandem with new canvases, the presentation underscores the porous boundary between painting and sculpture in Crews-Chubb’s work, as well as his enduring interest in transformation, ritual, and the elemental forces of making.

In his sculptures and paintings alike, Crews-Chubb conceives of the figure as a vessel for containing chaos. His turbulent paintings result from a process that involves intuitive painting, drawing, and collage; he spills, throws, and sprays ink and pigment across the canvas before deriving a figure from the spontaneously occurring ground. He then refines his figures by integrating charcoal sketches, impasto painting, and fragments of collaged canvas. Where the artist’s previous figurative paintings have reflected on universal aspects of the human condition, systems of belief, and iconography, these new paintings are more personal. They reflect, Crews-Chubb describes, how the artist experiences the world in his own body. With these works he processes emotions related to vulnerability and existential doubt—the feeling of being a passenger in one’s own life.

Our presentation features ten paintings—nine large scale and one small scale—from the new series, Dismantled Figures, which each comprise a single figure, and from the ongoing series Out of Chaos, which feature two or more figures. These series draw from the same well, relating to the ancient Greek mythological notion that chaos is a state of undifferentiated matter from which the universe emerged. Where the solitary figures tend to the ego of it all, reflecting a somber unease, the groups of figures find some resolution in the idea that energy is not destroyed, but transformed, forever moving between chaos and order.