Daniel Crews-Chubb

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Statuesque, Daniel Crews-Chubb’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Comprising seven ambitious mixed-media paintings and six studies on paper, Statuesque presents a wide-ranging exploration of the artist’s relationship to historic artifacts. Crews-Chubb is a magpie for figurative sculpture across time and culture, collecting their poses, volumes, and ornaments. The artist has developed a powerful visual language connecting sources of inspiration from fearsome Aztec deities to Henry Moore’s deconstructed reclining women, reflecting on our obsessive repetition of the human form in sculpture.

Crews-Chubb describes the figures in his work as evading identity by “resembling something familiar but also completely alien: Are they male or female? good or evil? human or non-human? They are like Frankenstein’s monster, a mix-mash of parts of things I have seen.” In their ambiguity, the motif of Crews-Chubb’s figure is an everyman of art history as well as a reminder of the omnipresence of the human image in our contemporary moment. This new body of work marks a transition from the ancient and ethnographic references of the artist’s Immortals series, currently on view at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England to the imagery and gestures of the Italian Renaissance, which Crews-Chubb has been studying in preparation for his major 2024 exhibition at the Museo 900 in Florence. Transported to Los Angeles, a place synonymous with newness and modernist experimentation, the works included in Statuesque reimagine historical iconography in the city’s graffiti-punctuated palette and sprawling scale.

Daniel Crews-Chubb’s (b. 1984, Northampton, England; based in London, England) work is represented in the permanent collections of The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Denver Art Museum, Denver CO; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford UK; The Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection New York, NY; The Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL; The CC Foundation, Shanghai, China; Aurora Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Hall Art Foundation, New York, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Chu Foundation 譽婷堂, Hong Kong; Deighton Family Collection, London, UK; Space K, Seoul, South Korea; Taylor Collection, Denver, CO; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China and Modern Forms Collection, London, UK. Crews-Chubb’s first institutional installation opened in June 2021 at the Wellington Arch, London, UK and his first major institutional exhibition opened in July 2023 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.