A few days before the opening of his third solo show ‘Under the Same Sky’ at London’s Studio Voltaire, Jake Grewal, a rising star of the British art scene is thoughtfully surveying his latest work as the final curatorial decisions are being made. Soft January light is tumbling into the room whilst a metal crane obscures a curved triptych of around six metres long depicting five naked figures moving across a landscape of yellow rocks. Smaller intimate works, such as one depicting a brooding cliff with two slender figures standing atop bathed in a glorious orange pink sky, are propped up on breeze blocks. The gallery’s former Victorian mission hall architecture works well Grewal says because it feels ‘open and expansive’ which reflects the new paintings. ‘I think people think my work is quite closed and intense, quite dark, and I wanted to make a different statement,’ he says.
Grewal’s work to date has been an exploration of figuration and landscape, he using charcoal and oil paint to create pictures full of intrigue, ambiguity and a certain kind of poetic longing. They’re exquisitely lit; at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, ‘Laid to Rest’ from 2021-2 depicts two figures in a forest of skeletal trees, a flash of lowering sunset hovers between them. During his previous solo show of 2023, ‘Some days I feel more alive’ at Pallant House in Chichester - where he also curated a room of artworks by British romantics such as Keith Vaughn - a work ‘To Leave You Is To Keep You’ featured two men’s heads morphing into one another as they kissed.
