From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here . ‘I t ’s not finished,’ Jake Grewal tells me as I stand and stare at the massive triptych seascape leaning against the wall of his studio in Hackney.
‘It was incredibly saturated a couple of days ago, so I’ve knocked quite a lot of it back.’ Made up of three large canvases arranged next to each other, the work is bright and joyous: a great swash of pristine blue sky, earthy rocks underneath and three figures clambering around them. As I am looking, I start to think that those figures could in fact be one person in three different phases of motion.
‘I wanted it to be referential to some kind of cubist sense of movement, with the figure moving through the rocks,’ Grewal says, right on cue. I find myself thinking, too, of those dynamic Futurist artworks – Giacomo Balla’s Flight of the Swallows (1913), for instance – in which repetition of a single object conveys motion. It feels like a surprising association to make.
Born in south London in 1994 to an Indian father and a British mother, Grewal has made his name through subtle paintings and drawings characterised by tenderness, emotional sensitivity and allusiveness that feels anathema to the hard edges and brash industrial quality of much of those avant-garde movements that sprang up in the early 20th century. His paintings and drawings usually depict nature, male figures or male figures in nature: a man, contorted in a Schiele-esque pose, t.