November 2017
Jake's studio is eerily quiet after an incredibly busy few months, as the paintings for his latest solo show have been framed, packed and are currently en-route to Unit London in preparation for the opening next week.
The exhibition runs from 1st December 2017 to 6th January 2018, with a private view on Thursday 30th December. To reserve your place at the PV, please visit the event booking page by clicking here.
'Transitions' will feature 18 new works and will be accompanied by a text written by art historian Catherine McCormack. The excerpt from the show catalogue below gives some background on the collection.
For more information about the work and to request a full catalogue, please contact Unit London direct via art@theunitldn.com or visiting http://theunitldn.com/
TRANSITIONS | JAKE WOOD-EVANS
‘His ambition has been to restore a sense of monumentality and quiet beyond the superficial aesthetic of the twenty-first century.’ - Prof. Catherine McCormack PhD. Unit London is delighted to announce 'Transitions', a new exhibition by Hastings-based artist Jake Wood-Evans. Following the success of his 2016 show 'Subjection & Discipline', which saw the artist create a body of portraiture work inspired by 18th century Masters including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Henry Raeburn, 'Transitions' sees a shift of focus towards landscape and abstraction. Richly-coloured, light-imbued scenes characterise the work, in which seascapes and serene vistas appear as though through a veil or clouded glass. In one, a figure is suggested, glowing within a studio of silks and fabric; in another, a horse is suspended beneath a flood of luminosity. Leaving behind the subdued colours of previous collections, the canvases are splashed with vivid hues of gold, red, orange, turquoise and blue, whilst delicate brushwork is set alongside sweeping washes and horizontal scratches and scores. Taking influence from the work of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer and George Stubbs, among others, Wood-Evans’ paintings retain recognisable elements that allude to the conventions of art history. Drawing on these masters’ legacies, his intention is to capture the essence of these historic works without replicating them, depicting familiar, yet obscured subject matter. Through first creating, then scrubbing away, reworking and removing sections of a scene, the artist reveals ghostly infrastructures that preserve the warmthand glow of the original painting. Describing his work as ‘a process of conflict with the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction’, Wood-Evans resists the urge to provide easy readings or instantly accessible compositions. 'Transitions' invites the viewer to pause and quietly contemplate a series of multi-layered paintings that denote a common visual language built through our shared history and consumption of art imagery.
