Sohrab Crews was born in London in 1978, spending his early years in Zomba and Lilongwe (Malawi) and moving with his parents to Bath, England, in 1984. He has also lived in Qatar, Berlin and Taos (New Mexico). From 1997-2021 Crews resided in London, completing a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in 2001, and joining the alternative educational programme Alt MFA (London) in 2012. He currently resides in Bath.
Crews’ experience of a range of different geographical and cultural contexts has had a strong bearing on his work, as has his significant interest in post-war European avant-garde art, American painting and sculpture, and mixed-media practices of all kinds. His own work manifests the recurrent themes of order and control, structure, colour and expressive intensity, notably through his ongoing experimentation with a wide range of ideas, mediums and techniques. In 2007 Crews began to employ second-hand walking sticks as central motifs – and actual physical components – within his practice. These multi-referential, iconic objects appear in over thirty of the artist’s paintings and sculptures, as well as within many improvisational drawings. Other provocative objects and issues addressed by the artist include the “bastardised” language of advertising, the fashions and conventions of contemporary “Pop” culture, and the diffusion and recirculation of Kitsch commodities within present-day Western society. The artist directly integrates carefully-selected found materials into his own paintings and constructions as a parodic, critical reinterpretation of these cynically-motivated and highly-commercialised forms.
Extra Life, a limited-edition publication showcasing twenty-five of Crews’ monochromatic drawings, was published by Burbury in 2013. The book contains an essay on Crews’ work by British art critic Paul Carey-Kent, whose interview with Crews is also included.
Crews’ solo exhibitions include Extra Life (Vainart, Venice, 2014) and Extinction Play (Allen & Overy, London, 2014). In 2015, the artist presented a range of drawings at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects in East London, followed by The Line Between at Chelsea College of Arts Library (2016), and The Arrangements, held at Westminster Reference Library, London (2017). These library shows were curated by the artist and critic Peter Suchin.
Some sixteen individual series of works have been produced by Crews since 2001. His wide-ranging, exploratory practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, collage, assemblage, and the use of text as a central component of many of these distinct artistic forms.
