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LEGACY & DISORDER

Unit London, 21 May - 15 June 2019

Unit London presents a new solo exhibition by British artist, Jake Wood-Evans. Legacy & Disorder centres around Wood-Evans' fascination with combining the past and present. The artist’s large-scale oil paintings convey an altered atmosphere and re-appropriated view of 18th-century subjects, including portraiture, seascapes and figurative compositions.

The painterly works draw on the legacies of Old Masters through a layer of abstraction, depicting familiar, yet obscured content matter – updated for the digital age. Taking influence from the work of John Constable, J.M.W Turner, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer and George Stubbs, among others, Wood-Evans’ next generation painting style retains recognisable elements that allude to the conventions of art history. Wood-Evans’ ethereal, unsettling pictures evoke a haunting beauty; as the artist describes, his work is ‘a process of conflict with the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction.

Legacy & Disorder follows Wood-Evans’ recent 2018 museum exhibition REPORTRAIT at the Nottingham Castle Museum and previous solo exhibitions, Subjection & Discipline and Transitions with Unit London. The upcoming body of work is focused around the creation of a transient, enveloping yet imploding space for his fragmented historical figures to inhabit.

Coming to this body of work via a period of concentration on landscape paintings last year, the artist – much like one of his biggest idols, Thomas Gainsborough – has found his interest piqued in the pictorial setting of a subject. The area that surrounds his central figures has become a fertile ground for a new energy and experimentation. The works evoke a dream like version of the countryside idylls and stately landscapes found in the portrait backdrops of powerful and influential 18th-century figures. Aesthetically, the paintings are both joyful and profoundly unnerving, suggestive of the uneasy dreams of an English ruling class that cannot quite believe in its own rhetoric and grandeur. The figures, vibrating with ambivalence, are situated in a space that seems to refuse to stand still.

In a departure from his previous body of work, the surface of Wood-Evans' new canvases have a smooth, glossy and delicate finish, despite retaining an intense richness of perspective and volume, achieved through the artist’s use of colour and light. Alongside precise attention to detail and a studied craftsmanship, there is an obvious joy in experimentation and looseness of application. Reworking and reusing previously painted and discarded canvases, Wood-Evans introduces an anarchy of shape, form and colour, which reflects the magnificent pandemonium of life, past and present, in a chaotic, colliding overlay.

A heightened focus on the grandiose fabrics and dress worn by the subjects is prominent in the artist’s work. Wood-Evans’ figures are dichotomies, they appear in a state of fluidity and transformation. They are simultaneously both relevant and threateningly obscure. The artist has placed clues and suggestions in the works, leaving them open for interpretation. Ultimately, Legacy & Disorder offers a refuge amongst the sublime beauty and tranquility of the paintings, and the turmoil of a constantly shifting, fractured reality.

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Click image above to view exhibition catalogue

JakeWoodEvansLegacy&Disorder_Talk_LucyEm
JakeWoodEvansLegacy&Disorder_Talk_LucyEm
JakeWoodEvansLegacy&Disorder_Talk_LucyEm

Jake Wood-Evans in conversation with Kathleen Soriano, renowned curator, writer and presenter, at Unit London to mark the opening of Legacy & Disorder

Legacy & Disorder - full collection of works

Portrait of Mrs Hamilton Nisbet

Portrait of Mrs Hamilton Nisbet

after Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019

Sophia Charlotte Digby Lady Sheffied

Sophia Charlotte Digby Lady Sheffied

after Thomas Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019

Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott

Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott

after Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019

Sir Christopher and Lady Sykes

Sir Christopher and Lady Sykes

after Romney, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 3

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 3

200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 1

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 1

200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 2

The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 2

200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019

Master James Hatch, after Beechey

Master James Hatch, after Beechey

180x140cm, oil on linen

Study for Mrs William Villebois

Study for Mrs William Villebois

after Gainsborough, 157x102cm, oil on linen, 2019

Study for Princess Sophia

Study for Princess Sophia

Daughter of George III, after Beechey, 157x102cm, oil on linen, 2019

Oil studies on wood:

Oil studies on wood:

Study for Mrs Thomas Scott Jackson, after Romney; Study for Mrs Henry Maxwell, after Romney; Study for Anne, Lady de la Pole, after Romney; all 38x30cm, 2019

Margaret and Mary Gainsborough

Margaret and Mary Gainsborough

after Gainsborough, 220x180cm, oil on linen, 2019

Portrait of Queen Charlotte

Portrait of Queen Charlotte

after Gainsborough, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019

Unknown woman and child after Romney

Unknown woman and child after Romney

220x160cm, oil on linen, 2019

The Prince Regent, Later George IV

The Prince Regent, Later George IV

after Lawrence, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019

George IV, when Prince of Wales

George IV, when Prince of Wales

after Hoppner, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019

George Spencer, Duke of Marlborough

George Spencer, Duke of Marlborough

after Romney, 220x135cm, oil on linen, 2019

Study for Lady Doyle, after Lawrence

Study for Lady Doyle, after Lawrence

82x75cm, oil on linen, 2019

Study for Elizabeth Gunning

Study for Elizabeth Gunning

Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll, after Reynolds, 90x84cm, oil on linen, 2019

Study for George Spencer

Study for George Spencer

4th Duke of Marlborough, after Romney, 103x776cm, oil on linen, 2019

Study for King George III

Study for King George III

in coronation robes, after Ramsay, 38x30cm, oil on wood, 2019

Study for King George III

Study for King George III

after Lawrence, 38x30cm, oil on wood, 2019

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