Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, leads an online discussion with artists Jake Grewal and Doron Langberg.
Together, they will discuss how Grewal and Langberg's respective painting practices speak to ideas of queer desire, through their shared interest in and use of art historical references, nature, and spaces of transformation.
An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that are luminous in colour, often large in scale and hinge on a sense of intimacy. Depicting himself, his family, friends, and lovers, Langberg’s paintings celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process – a closeness that engages with new dialogues around queer sensuality and sexuality. In Langberg's works, a dynamic interplay between people and the places they inhabit, in which areas might appear boldly declarative or remain consciously indeterminate, lends the work its distinctive psychological register. Work by the artist is currently on view as part of the collection display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, and the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.
Jake 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. 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 latest works draw a line through to histories of plein-air painting, his scenes often appear more evocative of an interior, emotional world than based in any one location. Grewal's current exhibition at Studio Voltaire, Under The Same Sky, is his first solo institutional exhibition in London, following significant solo exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery (2023) and Thomas Dane Gallery (2022).
