Daniel Crews-Chubb in conversation with Dr Lena Fritsch
Autumn Term, sees the return of the Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations; dialogues between artists, curators and writers. Curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, lectures are held on Wednesday evenings.
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'Immortal III (red, green and pink)',Daniel Crews-Chubb, 2022. Oil, oil bar, acrylic, ink, charcoal, spray paint, sand, coarse pumice gel and collaged fabrics on canvas, 224 x 174 cm © Daniel Crews-Chubb / Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor
British artist Daniel Crews-Chubb has developed an intensely physical, mixed-media painting style, for which paint is smeared with the fingers, scratched with a stick, glopped on straight from the tube, sprayed from a can, and mixed into sand or pumice gel. The combination of this ‘wild’ and experimental use of materials with historical subject matter is a recurring characteristic of his work. His abstracted paintings are currently on view at the Ashmolean in the exhibition ‘Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich x Daniel Crews-Chubb’. Making new works for the show, Crews-Chubb was particularly interested in international pre-historic sculptures that depict non-human figures, such as deities. In his Immortals series, he has experimented with their postures and expressions to create his own fantastical figures.
This in-conversation between Daniel Crews-Chubb and Ashmolean curator Lena Fritsch will explore the artist’s work with time for questions and comments from the audience.
This is an in-person lecture held in our studios at the Royal Drawing School in Shoreditch. Places are free and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Daniel Crews-Chubb (b.1984 in Northampton) graduated from the Chelsea College of Arts in 2009, before studying at the Turps Art School, which offered a Painters Studio Programme. He is known for his innovative collage paintings, which interrogate the symbols and archetypes of art history through a personal mythology of figures. Crews-Chubb’s first institutional installation was shown in 2021 at the Wellington Arch, London, and his first museum exhibition opened in July 2023 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Timothy Taylor gallery, London; Roberts Project, LA; Vigo Gallery, London; and Galerist, Istanbul. Group exhibitions include Something Happened, PowerLong Museum, Shanghai (2020); Telescope, curated by Nigel Cooke at Hastings Contemporary (2019); Tree, Vigo Gallery, London (2018); and ICONOCLASTS: Art out of the Mainstream, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017).
His works are represented in international collections, including the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Long Museum, Shanghai; Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Hall Art Foundation. He lives and works in London.
Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, responsible for exhibitions, displays and acquisitions of international art. She teaches at the University of Oxford, V&A and SOAS. Previously, she was a curator at Tate Modern and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Fritsch co-curated the 2022 Roppongi Crossing triennial of contemporary Japanese art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. She holds a PhD from Bonn University and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo. Recent publications include Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich x Daniel Crews-Chubb (Ashmolean, 2023); Tokyo: Art & Photography (Ashmolean, 2021), A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (Ashmolean, 2019); Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (Thames & Hudson/Seigensha, 2018) and Giacometti (Tate Publishing, 2017).
Cover image: Daniel Crews-Chubb in his studio with paintings from the Immortals series, 2022. Photo credit: © T. Craig
Please note this Autumn Term the majority of lectures will take place in-person at the School, please check the individual event listings for details.