British artist Daniel Crews-Chubb, born in 1984, is set to open his solo exhibition ‘Immortality’ at the Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai from November 7, 2024, to January 5, 2025. This marks the artist’s first major art museum solo exhibition worldwide, showcasing over 30 paintings, including 9 new works from the exhibition’s series and 5 new works from the ‘In the Midst of Chaos’ series, inviting viewers to explore the diverse expressions of human figures through historical changes.
Crews-Chubb combines intuitive painting and collage in a complex and intense creative process, bringing to life vibrant and restless fantastical figures on paper. Starting from the subconscious, he randomly applies techniques such as splashing, throwing, and spraying ink and pigments to create dynamic backgrounds that naturally lead to the emergence of human figures. These figures appear either individually or as indescribable groups. The artist then gradually brings these figures to form through continuous charcoal sketches, thick oil painting, and the addition of pumice and canvas fragments. As a result, his paintings are rich in texture, highly tactile, evoking a sense of vast space and a strong sense of time. Crews-Chubb’s creations draw on ancient cultures and modern art history, reflecting contemplation on the human condition, involving themes of life and death, aesthetics, belief systems, and iconography. His ‘Immortality’ series (2022-2024) focuses on the concept of eternity, exploring the idea that humans create art to approach eternity or as a way to transcend physical limitations. From cave paintings to monumental sculptures, the depiction of human figures endows the subject with a sense of timelessness. Crews-Chubb creates from memory, reinterpreting historical images and narratives through his personal contemporary perspective. From the Toltecs to the Cobra movement, the resonance in portraying ideal divine figures spans the historical continuum, and Crews-Chubb seeks to find a universal human image that can break through the boundaries of time and space and still be accepted. Crews-Chubb’s latest series, ‘In the Midst of Chaos’ (2024), adopts a broader perspective, reflecting the material connections between all life and cosmic entities. Here, the artist’s spontaneous brushstrokes develop around human figures. His figures have no distinct gender or racial characteristics and almost no background, occupying a critical space that resonates with viewers.Beauty and ugliness, order and chaos contend with each other on the densely processed surfaces of these works. The title of this series is inspired by the ancient Greek concept of chaos and emptiness from which the universe is born. The concept of ‘meaning emerging from nothingness’ drives much of Crews-Chubb’s work. He often contemplates pareidolia, the human tendency to look for certain patterns or paradigms in clouds and stars. Through combinations of colors, lines and forms, the artist offers viewers a delightful visual world of images that are both familiar and strange. Daniel Crews-Chubb says, ‘Painting is a very enjoyable thing. My works trace back to early cave paintings and run through modernism, abstract expressionism, even Cobra art and outsider art. There are so many different moments in the history of painting that inspire me. Of course, my works are completed, but I hope they give people a feeling of being a bit unfinished so that viewers can immerse themselves in them.’ Full text opening hours: November 7 – January 5. The specific business status is subject to the opening situation on the day.
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