Healing The Heart

Jake Grewal (b.1994, London, lives and works in London). In Grewal’s paintings and drawings, nude figures, nearly always male and often based on the artist’s image, inhabit verdant forests and woodland landscapes. 

Drawing is central to Grewal’s practice. In his charcoal and pencil sketches, images and narratives are slowly brought into focus, often through the insistent repetition of an idea made in different mediums, on varying grounds and scales. There is an intimacy and expediency offered by charcoal and graphite that Grewal harnesses and embeds in his work to lend his figures the quality of being just out of reach. 

Sketching from Old Master paintings informs how Grewal constructs many of his images, drawing from painters such as Constable, Corot, Degas, and Gauguin, artists for whom a deeply evocative relationship to the natural world was central. Close scrutiny of these works allows Grewal to extract formal passages and devices from a quintessentially European landscape idiom and transpose these onto the landscapes of his imagination. As stage sets for subjects cast in the image of his own body, Grewal’s works challenge the entrenched white heteronormativity of the Western canon of painting.

Selected exhibitions include Now I Know I am Older (Curated by Andrew Bonacina), Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2022), Shifting Waters, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India, (2022); Dissolving Realms, curated by Katy Hessel, Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2022); On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India, (2021); Drawing Room Biennial 2021, Drawing Room, London, England (2021); Deity, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2020); and Everyday is Sunday, UTA Artists Space, California CA (2020).

The artist is represented by Thomas Dane Gallery