Daniel Crews-Chubb

Daniel Crews-Chubb (b. 1984, Northampton, United Kingdom) is a London-based painter whose mixed-media works wrestle with the human condition and modes of self-expression. His paintings pay homage to Abstract Expressionism, both in their gestural figuration that looks to Willem de Kooning and playful, improvisational use of collage, which recalls the three-dimensional quality of Robert Rauschenberg’s practice. Other works, like Flowers (after Van Gogh), channel earlier art-historical references, and many of the artist’s paintings look all the way back to the iconography of ancient Greece and Paleolithic totems like the Venus of Willendorf.

While his work mines our contemporary visual culture, Crews-Chubb intertwines canonical sources and classical allusions in paintings that are at once fantastical and relevant. He selects archetypes and symbols at will to create a highly personal, idiosyncratic lexicon of human and bestial figures. The artist employs collage and impasto techniques to construct his paintings, working and reworking his surfaces to dizzying effect until they seem at once to cohere and be on the verge of breaking apart. While loosely figural, his subjects function as prompts and containers for a wide-ranging and virtuosic mark-making.