Grewal's first institutional exhibition in London sees him soar to the top of the pile as one of London's most exciting young painters.
Drawing from the Western cannon of painting, adeptly employing the aesthetics of Romanticism for the new era, Jake Grewal is one of the city's most exciting plein-air painters. This exhibition, his first institutional exhibition in London, sees impressive new commissions including a mind-bending six-metre-wide panoramic, placing him impressively within the extensive cannon of Romantics and Impressionists.
Like other Impressionists (if he were to not be offended by the title), Grewal works with themes of movement, change, and transformation forced by the thrust of time. His paintings are not still works, depicting nature ‘as it is’, but are works of fluidity that mirror the impermanence of our natural world.
His panoramic, for example, when stared at for long enough becomes a live image: waves crashing eternally against the rocks, rather than a mere depiction of white water; the susurrations of the trees and the wavering branches make more than a suggestion of wind, but that wind is itself a part of the painting; the rolling clouds that obfuscate the horizon are frustratingly static, as they appear to have their own kinetic potential.
For the commission, Jake Grewal embarked on a lengthy sojourn around India in his first ever visit, through the northern cities of Varanasi, Amritsar and Delhi, as well as the mountainous areas of Himachal Pradesh. Grewal then spent a month studying landscape scenes at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, the oldest working artists’ studios in the country.