Daniel Crews-Chubb is a London-based painter whose mixed-media works grapple with the human condition and the ways in which we give form to the self. His paintings are steeped in the legacy of Abstract Expressionism — both in a gestural approach to figuration that recalls Willem de Kooning, and in a playful, improvisational use of collage that echoes the three-dimensionality of Robert Rauschenberg. Elsewhere, as in “Flowers (after Van Gogh)”, he reaches further back through art history, and much of his work looks all the way to the iconography of ancient Greece and to Palaeolithic totems such as the Venus of Willendorf.

Though rooted in contemporary visual culture, Crews-Chubb’s paintings weave canonical sources and classical allusion into images that feel at once fantastical and immediate. Drawing freely on archetypes and symbols, he has built a deeply personal, idiosyncratic vocabulary of human and bestial figures. Using collage and impasto, he constructs each surface through relentless working and reworking — to the point where the compositions seem simultaneously to hold together and to teeter on the edge of collapse. Loosely figurative, his subjects act less as fixed depictions than as prompts and vessels for a wide-ranging, virtuosic language of mark-making.