Jake Grewal

This exhibition of new works by Jake Grewal (b.1994, London) will be the artist’s first institutional exhibition in London. 

Primary to this exhibition will be a new panoramic painting, which marks Grewal’s most ambitiously scaled work to date. The curved canvas, almost six metres in length, gives substantial movement and momentum to Grewal’s core thematics, expanding his painterly explorations of transformation and time. 

Grewal draws from Western canons of painting, deftly harnessing the language of Romanticism and suffusing them with a queer gaze. Within his scenes, the artist frequently pictures nude figures, nearly always male and often based on his own image, to convey a sense of human fragility and communion with nature. Equally, his work is underpinned by a rigorous drawing practice, and his charcoal and pencil sketches vary from depictions of vivid, verdant forests to charred, clouded landscapes. Grewal has produced a significant new series of paintings and drawings for this exhibition, which develop from his travels in India and Cornwall in 2024, where he focussed on translating light, form and colour in the surrounding landscapes.

For the commission at Studio Voltaire, Grewal embarked on a sustained period in India, his first time visiting the country, travelling through southern Goa, Kerala; the northern cities of Varanasi, Amritsar and Delhi; and the mountainous areas of Himachal Pradesh. The artist then spent a month-long period exploring coastal landscapes at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. As the oldest working artists’ studios in the country, Porthmeor is renowned for its history of hosting artists who had a decisive effect on the development of modern painting in Britain. Grewal was resident in Porthmeor’s storied Studio 5, previously occupied by Ben Nicholson, followed by Patrick Heron, two of the most influential painters of their generation.

The artist’s explorations of self find form in compositions distilled from an expansive personal library of visual references, shifting from art historical and cinematic sources to collected photographs and family images. While Grewal’s new body of work draws a line through to histories of plein-air painting, his works depicting shoresides often appear more evocative of an interior, psychological world than based in any one location.