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Roberts Tasks is happy to announce Statuesque, Daniel Crews-Chubb’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Comprising seven formidable mixed-media work and 6 research on paper, Statuesque presents a wide-ranging exploration of the artist’s relationship to historic artifacts. Crews-Chubb is a magpie for figurative sculpture throughout time and tradition, accumulating their poses, volumes, and ornaments. The artist has developed a strong visible language connecting sources of inspiration from fearsome Aztec deities to Henry Moore’s deconstructed reclining girls, and reflecting on our obsessive repetition of the human type in sculpture.
Crews-Chubb describes the figures in his work as evading identification by “resembling one thing acquainted but in addition fully alien: Are they male or feminine? good or evil? human or non-human? They’re like Frankenstein’s monster, a mix-mash of elements of issues I’ve seen.” Of their ambiguity, the motif of Crews-Chubb’s determine is an everyman of artwork historical past in addition to a reminder of the omnipresence of the human picture in our modern second. This new physique of labor marks a transition from the traditional and ethnographic references of the artist’s Immortals sequence, at present on view on the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England to the imagery and gestures of the Italian Renaissance, which Crews-Chubb has been learning in preparation for his main 2024 exhibition on the Museo 900 in Florence. Transported to Los Angeles, a spot synonymous with newness and modernist experimentation, the works included in Statuesque reimagine historic iconography within the metropolis’s graffiti-punctuated palette and sprawling scale.
Within the first gallery, single figures or ‘icons’ are proven along with thirteen-foot-wide work of three figures intertwined. These vary from the stable, silhouetted type of Immortal XIX (pink) (2023), to the frenetic motion of Three Immortals (petrol blue and mustard) (2023). The latter work reveals extra of the artist’s course of, with massive swaths of jewel-toned pigment anchoring the akimbo limbs and tilted heads of the themes within the middle. These work all start on the bottom, the place Crews-Chubb splashes every canvas with inks to create the imprecise form of figures. These uncontrived coloration fields permit the artist to “learn the tea leaves” as he describes it: Crews-Chubb is fascinated with the cognitive phenomenon of pareidolia, or the thoughts’s tendency to acknowledge acquainted objects in summary shapes, like seeing an animal within the clouds. Permitting that unconscious course of to information his compositions, he then sketches over these natural inky varieties with extra exact outlines in charcoal, after which builds the compositions with impastoed oils, neon spray paint, floor pumice, and layered strips of canvas.
This method just isn’t not like a sculptor’s demandingly bodily methodology of increase and carving away from pure supplies like marble or clay. Within the closing work, moments from Crews-Chubb’s energetic manufacturing course of are left seen to the viewer, with unintentional or unguided marks animating extra managed and intentional components. The ultimate outcome produces the viewer’s personal expertise of pareidolia: seeing a slash of crimson paint as a cape, simply because the superhero-like character in Immortal XXI (ultramarine blue) (2023) wears, or a comb-like form in the direction of the bottom of the work as a foot. This impact pulls the viewer into the monumental work, bringing the limitless scroll of our modern picture repertoire alongside into the work.
The second gallery focuses on a virtually monochromatic group of works on paper in layers of oil stick, ink, charcoal, acrylic, and spray paint. Crews-Chubb usually produces research on the finish of a sequence, moderately than on the preparatory stage. These six drawings act as a coda to the Immortals sequence created for the artist’s first main institutional exhibition on the Ashmolean Museum, which opened in July this yr. The Immortals give attention to the repetitive return to the human type in artwork by way of the millennia, significantly in representations of gods and deities. The repetition of a generalized or hybridized human determine in Crews-Chubb’s personal work lends an immortality to the mortal, connecting the modern with the traditional. In these research, stripped of his ordinary brilliant palette and ornate layering, Crews-Chubb analyzes the Immortals as a way to discover new compositions for future work. In these pared-down works, the cautious balancing act at work within the work between contrived and uncontrived, recognizable and unrecognizable, involves the fore.
The motif of the determine within the artist’s oeuvre capabilities as a structural system to discover summary mark making. Crews-Chubb has noticed, “I believe that there’s a lot of pressure in my work; pressure between the figurative and the summary, between the fabric and the picture.” That pressure between abstraction and figuration takes cues from twentieth Century modernist masters like Willem de Kooning and Georg Baselitz, who additionally used stylized figural motifs as a through-line of their extremely experimental practices. In these smaller black-and-white research, the framing system of the determine turns into much less recognizable than in Crews-Chubb’s monumental work. The disparity between the 2 areas highlights the drama of conflicting forces balanced in these Statuesque work. Because the artist notes, “the figure-as-motif someway controls the chaos.”
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