Exhibition: Daniel Crews-Chubb – Another Place, 99 Bishopsgate, London, November 26 2009 – February 2010
Chelsea College of Art graduate Daniel Crews-Chubb's exuberant oil paintings are often deliberately misleading about the places they come from.
In his first solo show, Places I Have Never Visited at Westminster's City Inn last July, the young artist revealed eight pictures of major cities he'd never been to in person, instead choosing to base his works on accounts from the internet.
Daniel Crews-Chubb, Venice (2009)
They look like richly hectic, visually seductive landscapes, but closer inspection shows layers of artifice - pandas float over the kaleidoscopic Tokyo metropolis, masked figures pose in front of Venice canals and armchairs compete with battered old cars for space under Texan skies touched by towering skyscrapers.
Informed by the conflict between identity and globalisation, his distortions and abstract blurs reflect a world whose lack of individuality is "effectively neutralising cultures", according to Crews-Chubb.
Tokyo
"The paintings offer the viewers an opportunity to position themselves in a new, impossible dimension of space, created through disrupting the coherence of physical space," he says, believing himself to be "part of a new generation of post-globalisation painters" who embrace "painting by assumption and imagination".
He lists search engines, media, travel books, blogs, cinema and personal bias as his key influences, and speaks of "considered mistakes" creating "mental snapshots".
Kyoto
"The paintings are a direct comment on the time in which we live," he adds.
"They're about the knowledge I have acquired, however inaccurate that may be."
Open 7am-8pm Monday-Friday. Admission free.
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