Daniel Crews-Chubb
This summer, the Ashmolean launches its contemporary exhibition series Ashmolean NOW. The museum’s Gallery 8 will become a laboratory for contemporary artists who have been invited to create new work inspired by the Ashmolean’s historical collections. The first exhibition features new works by two young London-based painters, Daniel Crews-Chubb and Flora Yukhnovich.
Daniel Crews-Chubb (b. 1984) will present a group of large-scale paintings that take inspiration from depictions of ancient deities found in the Ashmolean. The figures in his paintings depart from any direct historical references to invent his own mythology. These ‘immortals’, as Crews-Chubb calls them, are created through a laborious process of addition and revision including drawing, impasto, and collage. The textured patchwork of his canvasses gives Crews-Chubb’s monumental subjects a three-dimensional presence that, as he describes, ‘corrodes the boundary between painting and sculpture’. His work will reflect on the way sacred cultural artefacts are displayed in British museums, through his own lens.
For this series of three exhibitions in Gallery 8, each artist will explore different areas of the Museum’s broad collections. Ashmolean NOW will feature their four very different points of view.