Daniel Crews-Chubb: Humanoids

24 Nov 2021-22 Jan 2022

Overview

Bringing together nine new paintings and four drawings, Humanoids navigates the material and mythological world the artist has explored for many years. ‘The most human thing in the world is to create,’ Crews-Chubb says. His new paintings, stained a rich melange of brilliant cobalt and scarlet, gilded yellow and swamp-green, are as much about the process and history of human artistry as they are about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Myths of creation and ascendancy appear across his oeuvre, weaving together references to Frankenstein’s monster, a tribe of fallen angels from the Book of Enoch, Greco-Roman deities in vibrant shades of blue and rose-madder. Through rough patchworks of torn fabric and inky spills of vivid colour, a strange race of figures emerges. Charcoal swathes define faces and figures who seem to move within their frames, submerging us in the artist’s process: stretching and coiling and twisting their bodies, multiple eyes meet the viewer’s gaze.