'It's a metaphor for life': rising star and 'Queer' poster artist Jake Grewal on his new London exhibition

A few days before the opening of his third solo show ‘Under the Same Sky’ at London’s Studio Voltaire, Jake Grewal, a rising star of the British art scene is thoughtfully surveying his latest work as the final curatorial decisions are being made. Soft January light is tumbling into the room whilst a metal crane obscures a curved triptych of around six metres long depicting five naked figures moving across a landscape of yellow rocks. Smaller intimate works, such as one depicting a brooding cliff with two slender figures standing atop bathed in a glorious orange pink sky, are propped up on breeze blocks. The gallery’s former Victorian mission hall architecture works well Grewal says because it feels ‘open and expansive’ which reflects the new paintings. ‘I think people think my work is quite closed and intense, quite dark, and I wanted to make a different statement,’ he says.

Grewal’s work to date has been an exploration of figuration and landscape, he using charcoal and oil paint to create pictures full of intrigue, ambiguity and a certain kind of poetic longing. They’re exquisitely lit; at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, ‘Laid to Rest’ from 2021-2 depicts two figures in a forest of skeletal trees, a flash of lowering sunset hovers between them. During his previous solo show of 2023, ‘Some days I feel more alive’ at Pallant House in Chichester - where he also curated a room of artworks by British romantics such as Keith Vaughn - a work ‘To Leave You Is To Keep You’ featured two men’s heads morphing into one another as they kissed.

‘It is fundamentally diaristic… real emotions, whether they’re memories or something I am trying to process,’ Grewal says of his practise. ‘It’s more than just trying to make something look beautiful or good. I am really trying to gouge out some kind of lived experience.’

It is this approach that resonated with film director Luca Guadagnino, who has been following Grewal for a few years, has bought works by him and recently had him create a poster for his latest film ‘Queer’ starring Daniel Craig. ‘As soon as I was in front of [his] art, I was hit by it,’ he said recently in an interview. ‘What I love about Jake’s work is the personal... the idea that the work comes from such an intimate reflection of self.’

His triptych centrepiece at Studio Voltaire, ‘The Ceaseless Cycle of Erosion’ went through at least five smaller scale iterations says Grewal. ‘It is a metaphor for life and how I feel about relationships,’ he offers. During the inception and creation of this particular body of work the artist turned 30, and the day after celebrating, his then relationship ended.

‘It feels almost like a commentary on the cycles I find myself in. Every two or three years it seems as if you've kind of grown, but then, the same shit seems to happen, and you're like, well I thought we were moving forward, but then you go back, and then you have to move forward again.’ He pauses. ‘Like a wave.’

Last year, Grewal took two trips - one to India and one to Cornwall - that greatly influenced and informed the paintings featured in ‘Under the Same Sky.’ He spent time at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives - Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Francis Bacon amongst others painted there - which allowed him the kind of space to work in a panoramic fashion. It was also quite rudimentary.

‘I didn't have a printer. I went to Boots and printed out my [research] photographs, cut them up and pasted them together to create this Duchamp ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ cubist-like idea, which became ‘The Ceaseless Cycle of Erosion.’ Grewal also went out everyday and sat on a cliff to paint the sunset.

‘I’ve been more confident in my use of color since India,’ explains Grewal. Though this trip’s significance Grewal particularly equates with feeling less displaced within his own identity. It was the first time he’d visited the country where his paternal grandparents live and his father - who rejected his religious upbringing - was born.

Grewal grew up in Kennington in London, graduated with a BA in Fine Art: Painting from Brighton University before completing an MA at The Drawing School in London which he completed in 2019. His first solo show, ‘Now I Know You I Am Older’ was staged at Thomas Dane in London in 2022 to critical acclaim. In March 2023, he won the inaugural JW Anderson Collections Fund which resulted in his charcoal work ‘The Sentimentality Of Nature’ of 2022 being acquired for the permanent collection of the Wakefield Hepworth.

Last autumn, during a studio visit while Grewal was in the thick of working on the paintings for ‘Under the Same Sky’ some art historical clues to the inspirations gripping the young artist were in plain view. There were books of Peter Doig, Monet, Bonnard, Per Kirkeby, Cecily Brown alongside postcards of Degas’ ‘Young Spartans Exercising’ and Cezanne’s ‘The Bathers.’ Meanwhile Joan Mitchell’s confidence with colour, scale and abstraction were also fundamental - ‘I want to think about colour as a way of feeling, not just as an observation’ - whilst seeing many post impressionist works in both America and Paris during last year he says really anchored this latest work.

Similarly, books he collected on Jack Cousteau - French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author - appealed for their saturated imagery and sense of adventure. ‘Across the Great Water’ - an evocative pinky-grey hazy canvas at Studio Voltaire that features a solitary figure walking on a beach - speaks to Grewal’s analysis that water, a through-line in the exhibition, offers various interpretations, from freedom to mystery, and ultimately to the fact that the sea is ‘a place to superimpose our own human ideas.’

For Grewal, beyond a sense of creating emotional depth in his work, he thinks it important to push himself technically for himself and the audience. ‘I want there to be a sense of excitement about the materiality and about the way that I'm using the material to express movement,” he says. Increasingly, he has worked with linen over canvas, which he has found allows for more layering and depth to his mark making and despite no charcoal works being shown at Studio Voltaire Grewal has been developing ways to emulate with paint the way charcoal appears to dissolve because of the grain of the paper. Meanwhile the figures in his works which have always been based on Grewal himself have also evolved and are now more abstract. ‘I would say they're becoming less like self portraits.’

'Under the Same Sky’ runs 15 January-13 April 2025 at Studio Voltaire. studiovoltaire.org