Soho to Montmartre: Observations on Life

About

Crean & Company is delighted to announce its first solo artist show on British figurative painter Rupert Shrive. Entitled Soho to Montmartre: Observations on Life, this recent collection of works reflects on Shrive’s artistic trajectory and the influence of his time spent living in London, Paris and Valencia. The show features a diverse range of 35 artworks, from his cross-genre paintings and landscape compositions to his new series of ‘Lockdown Lives’ – still lives animated with unusual objects – which together illustrate the evolution of the artist’s unique figurative style.

At the heart of Shrive’s practice is an interest in abstracting human form. His work is influenced by the School of London of the 1970s: a group of figurative painters that included David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, with whom Shrive became acquainted in the pubs of Soho while a St Martins student in the 1980s. From Freud’s intense observation and Hockney’s technical experimentation, to Bacon’s breaking up and rebuilding of the subject, Shrive’s inspirations culminate in his own distinctive body of work.