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.
Click image above to view exhibition catalogue
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 Nisbetafter Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Sophia Charlotte Digby Lady Sheffiedafter Thomas Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliottafter Gainsborough, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019 |
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Sir Christopher and Lady Sykesafter Romney, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019 | The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 3200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019 | The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 1200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019 |
The Blue Boy, after Gainsborough 2200x128cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Master James Hatch, after Beechey180x140cm, oil on linen | |
Study for Mrs William Villeboisafter Gainsborough, 157x102cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Study for Princess SophiaDaughter of George III, after Beechey, 157x102cm, oil on linen, 2019 | 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 Gainsboroughafter Gainsborough, 220x180cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Portrait of Queen Charlotteafter Gainsborough, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Unknown woman and child after Romney220x160cm, oil on linen, 2019 |
The Prince Regent, Later George IVafter Lawrence, 220x150cm, oil on linen, 2019 | George IV, when Prince of Walesafter Hoppner, 220x140cm, oil on linen, 2019 | George Spencer, Duke of Marlboroughafter Romney, 220x135cm, oil on linen, 2019 |
Study for Lady Doyle, after Lawrence82x75cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Study for Elizabeth GunningDuchess of Hamilton and Argyll, after Reynolds, 90x84cm, oil on linen, 2019 | Study for George Spencer4th Duke of Marlborough, after Romney, 103x776cm, oil on linen, 2019 |
Study for King George IIIin coronation robes, after Ramsay, 38x30cm, oil on wood, 2019 | Study for King George IIIafter Lawrence, 38x30cm, oil on wood, 2019 |