Solitary Us: Couples Paintings

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Solitary Us: Couples Paintings, an exhibition of nine mixed-media collage paintings by artist Daniel Crews-Chubb. This new body of work, produced during the lockdown period in the UK amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, continues Crews-Chubb’s exploration of human relationships and are self-reflective and reactionary to the sense of isolation the artist experienced at the time. This exhibition follows Chariots, Beasts, and Belfies, the gallery’s inaugural presentation with the artist in 2018. Mimicking statuesque poses repeated throughout history, Crews-Chubb’s Couples paintings feel nostalgically familiar. Inspired by ancient artifacts depicting gods, goddesses and mythology in art, in addition to human-animal hybrids, or therianthropes, and other hybridized creatures, Crews-Chubb’s figures reinterpret these stories while accentuating their heroic and powerful themes. They combine the idealizations of beauty and harmony of the Romanesque period with the simplicity and bold lines from ancient Egyptian art, while including direct references from Dogū pottery from the Jōmon period of prehistoric Japan, Celtic masks from the Bronze Age, headdresses and helmets inspired by pre-Columbian and Roman artefacts, and—perhaps most relevant to the Couples paintings—the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, a late sixth-century BC Etruscan anthropoid sarcophagus from Caere. Crews-Chubb then weaves modern art influences, including the emotive language of Ab Ex, the pure color and form of Fauvism, and the stylistic vision of Modernism, as well as pop culture action figures from his childhood which lend themselves readily to an interpretative lens through which to view his work. Paradoxically, while his paintings look back and connect across time, they are devoid of any specific culture, identity or gender; there is no muse. Instead, the artist sees his figures as motifs, a compositional framework to experiment with. Daniel Crews-Chubb’s first major institutional show will open in the fall of 2022 at The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK, and he recently opened, in June 2021, The Consequences of Play, a year-long exhibit at one of London’s most famous landmarks, Wellington Arch in collaboration with English Heritage and Vigo Gallery. The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Timothy Taylor Gallery, New York (2020); Choi and Lager Gallery, Seoul (2021); Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2018); Vigo Gallery, London (2016); and Galerist, Istanbul (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Something Happened, Powerlong Art Center, Shanghai, (2020); 45 at 45, LA Louver; Los Angeles (2020); Synchroncity, Roberts Projects (2020); Telescope, curated by Nigel Cooke; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings (2019); Tree, Vigo Gallery, London (2018); the inaugural exhibition at The Bunker, Florida, curated by Laura Dvorkin (2018); and Iconoclasts: Art out of the Mainstream, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017). His works are represented in international public and private collections including the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Taylor Collection, Denver, CO; The Long Museum, Shanghai, China; CC Foundation, Shanghai, China; The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; The Bunker Artspace and Beth Rudin DeWoody Collections, Palm Beach, FL and New York, NY; The Hall Art Foundation, New York, NY and the Chu Foundation 譽婷堂, Hong Kong.

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