[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]H[/dropcap]ampshire Cultural Trust in collaboration with Unit London announce an exhibition of specially created new works by the leading British artist, Jake Wood-Evans. Titled Relic, the exhibition features more than 20 new works, including 16 large-scale paintings which explore Wood-Evans’ enduring themes of mortality and history, re-appropriating classical subjects for the digital age.
Recalling the great masterpieces of Baroque art, from Rubens to Van Dyke, Wood-Evans’ paintings fuse the great Romantic tradition of painting with the modernist sensibility of abstract artists such as Rothko and Motherwell. He brings to his art a subtle understanding of the passage of time, expressed in his appropriation of existing historic portraits which he re-works through a process including cropping, erasure and over-painting. Whilst this implies a deliberate and formal approach, the ‘accidental’ and the importance of surface and texture are equally important for the artist. Scenes are washed with a depth of colour, as if clouded by smoke or the eroded surface of a discarded film, creating a quality of living dialogue between artist and subject which might in turn be continued by the viewer.
Relic follows Wood-Evans’ recent critically acclaimed solo show at Unit London, Legacy & Disorder, and is a move away from full-length portraiture. There is also the addition for the first time of large-scale curved canvases for his Assumption series, based on the commission for the Cathedral of Our Lady Antwerp by Rubens, The Assumption of The Virgin Mary.
Relic runs at The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre, from 10 January – 29 March
Naila Scargill is the publisher and editor of horror journal Exquisite Terror. Holding a broad editorial background, she has worked with an eclectic variety of content, ranging from film and the counterculture, to political news and finance.
