Daniel Crews-Chubb

March – August 2023

The Arts Club Dubai is thrilled to announce a solo show by the acclaimed British artist Daniel Crews-Chubb (b.1984, based in London, UK). The exhibition presents four totemic paintings illustrating the artist’s iconic figures.

Known for his deeply expressive painting style, Crews-Chubb’s works conjure up spectacular collisions between abstraction and figuration; painterly and sculptural; and materiality and mythological. His multimedia surfaces incorporate vividly coloured oils and acrylics that rub up against sand, charcoals, pastels and textiles; patchworked together into raw and energetic compositions that elucidate the expressions and poses of his subjects.  Crews- Chubb’s paintings, in his own words, are “a dance between order and chaos.”

Crews-Chubb’s oeuvre draws inspiration from personal experience and beacons of literary and cultural history. He is as fascinated by the parables of Greek mythology and key movements throughout art history, as he is with childhood memorabilia and the ancient artefacts gathered from all over the world. In The Arts Club’s show, his mosaic-like, statuesque Venus recalls the legend of the God Venus’s creation. According to myth, Venus was born – fully grown – from a pearl created as her father’s seed was spilled across the ocean. Crews-Chubb’s playful tension between the mythological and the corporeal, the celestial and the earthly, is also hinted at in his Immortal, Yeti Dance and Giant. All poignantly evoke human forms made grotesque and magnificent both in their stories and in the artist’s practice.

Crews-Chubb’s process involves constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing a painting’s surface, layering, stitching, collaging fabrics in an almost sculptural relief while applying pigments and other resurfacing textures. The arduous editorial progression creates a dynamic surface that invites the viewer to retrace each painting’s story in a map-like manner as though witnessing the work’s creation. Thus, he creates an experience in which his viewers journey into the painting’s subject to find human form made fantastic throughout time and immortalised by passed down stories. “Immortality is our most eternal desire,” Crews-Chubb has said of his subjects. “It never goes away. To depict something in paint is to immortalise that subject, giving it a life beyond our own.”

Daniel Crews-Chubb’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world and have been acquired by public collections including: the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Long Museum, Shanghai; Saatchi Gallery, London; The Bunker Artspace and Beth Rudin de Woody Collections, Palm Beach and New York; and the Hall Art Foundation, New York. In July 2023, Crews-Chubb will open a solo show at the renowned Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The Arts Club collection and exhibitions are curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art. We are enormously grateful to Timothy Taylor Gallery, and especially to Daniel Crews-Chubb, for their collaboration. We would also like to thank the Danjuma Collection, the Woody and Katia Boueiz Collection and the VTB Collection, Dubai, for loaning works for this exhibition.