Jake Grewal

Meeting me at Hampstead tube station earlier that afternoon, the 29-year-old is wearing a teal bomber and indigo jeans, with a dark brown tartan scarf looped around his neck. I notice that the bomber also has a zip all the way up the back. “Sample sales,” he says, smiling and a little bashful. He’s measured and insightful, prone to taking a quiet beat after questions before answering in eloquent, balanced sentences. “In a way I feel like I’m manifesting living in Hampstead one day by coming here so much,” he says, as we walk the handsome streets in the direction of the Heath. In fact, he narrowly missed out on a one-bed flat in the area just last year.

A near-constant in Jake’s art, though, is the nude figures in natural landscapes. These characters, often based on Jake himself, are inhabitants of an Arcadian multiverse, one in which they can interact freely with nature and each other. Jake’s tendency to be his own subject shows a willingness to embrace and explore his vulnerability firsthand. The figures are sometimes together, sometimes alone. They stand barefoot in warm, muddy earth, bathe in calm, cool waters and hide bashfully behind abundant greenery. His references are ever-changing and diverse, but it’s clear that there are some long-running personal obsessions too. “I was so drawn to the Romanticists,” he says, “you know, in that way that you’re just drawn to things as a teenager? You can’t explain it.”

Two years ago, whilst wandering aimlessly through the British Museum with two artist friends from New York, I came across a couple of Jake’s drawings in a dimly lit upstairs gallery. The 2022 exhibition in which they were shown, ‘Drawing attention: emerging British artists’, placed new works by contemporary artists alongside pieces from the museum’s permanent collection that date back as far as the 1500s. Jake’s draw¬ings — a vivid scene in coloured pencil from 2019 and a misty charcoal study from 2021 — sat seamlessly alongside works by the likes of Odilon Redon and Michelangelo. Their easy inclusion in such an expansive sur¬vey was largely thanks to Jake’s ability to convey what could be described as timelessness. He thinks people have responded so enthusiastically to his work over the past couple of years because “during moments of upheaval, people go back to things that are tangible or evocative of something familiar, something nostalgic.”

Jake’s enjoyed a run of successful solo and group shows over the past two years after signing with London’s prestigious Thomas Dane Gallery and being celebrated with his first solo show there in 2022. In March 2023, the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield became the inaugural recipient of the JW Anderson Collections Fund, which every year gives £50,000 to a collecting institution to help it acquire works by artists who are under-represented in UK collections. The first work they bought was Jake’s charcoal drawing ‘The Sentimentality Of Nature’ (2022), which now sits in its permanent collection in Yorkshire.

After selling a number of early works off his own back, Jake rented a studio space with a handful of fellow artists. “It felt like such a lot of money to be spending every month,” he reflects. “It was something like £470 per month, which was almost unaffordable for me back then.” But soon after taking the leap, he was asked to be in an exhibition in Mumbai, alongside two other acclaimed queer artists of Indian descent, Prem Sahib and Sunil Gupta. The ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ show was a watershed moment for him, leading to his inclusion in a slew of other exhibitions, including 2020’s ‘New Contemporaries’ show (by the long-running British art incubator) at the South London Gallery, as well as group shows at Mayfair’s Michael Werner Gallery and the Kasmin Gallery in New York. Jake’s work at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai was typical of his output at the time: richly coloured, it depicted a nude figure seated on a thick branch, shaded by the canopy of a lush forest, light shining through the green leaves. It’s in stark contrast to the charcoal scenes that have become his recent mainstays. “There are so many ebbs and flows within my work,” he says. “In the past I’ve used nature as an allegory for what I’m talking about, and to an extent I still do that. But looking back, it feels very direct, and more obvious than what I do now.”

His inclusion in that show was a game-changer, but as an artist of both British and Indian heritage, he’s all too familiar with the art world’s inces¬sant desire to categorise. “I’ve found that in many cases people want to slot you comfortably into a preordained section: ‘Queer, British-Indian Painter’ or whatever,” he tells me frankly. “But I’d rather be seen on my own terms.” Whilst his work frequently deals with notions of identity and personal subjecthood, he’s cautious about representing an experience he’s yet to uncover. “I think people have been curious to know why I don’t reference an integral part of my lineage,” he continues, nodding to his father’s Indian background. “I’ve been told in the past that visiting India will have some sort of transformative effect on my work, but I haven’t been there yet, so I prefer to keep things open until that changes.” Jake is planning on taking an extended trip there later this year, though, so watch this space.

I ask Jake at what point he decided to explore queer desire and intimacy. “There was a definite moment, before the Drawing School, when I said to myself: ‘If I’m going to make paintings about queerness, then I need to do the research, watch all the queer cinema.’” He watched Derek Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’ and ‘Sebastiane’, as well as Alain Guiraudie’s ‘Stranger by the Lake’. “Queer cinema is also usually very beautiful to look at, so that doesn’t hurt either!” I confess to Jake that I had a similar period, in the aftermath of an undergraduate degree in art history, during which I focused almost exclusively on consuming queer stories and media, spend¬ing spells at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque watching hard-to-find clips. We agree on the importance of such excavatory experiences for budding queer creative practitioners. “I felt like I really had to root around and find things back then,” says Jake. “If there are no available representations of what you want to be or see, you have to search elsewhere and make your own discoveries.”

His exhaustive research started to manifest itself in his work. “Whilst I was studying at the Drawing School, we had lots of conversations about honesty, about making the work as honest as possible. And one day I just decided to put massive rolls of paper on the wall and draw two versions of myself naked, interacting with each other.” This recurring image (two male or androgynous figures interacting in the open air) is central to Jake’s visual language. Taking in desire and sensuality, loneliness and companionship, it’s part of the new visual record of queer experience. “I love looking to the past — to people who said certain powerful things at crucial moments, and who used interesting techniques to do so — as a way of pushing my own work further. It’s not a reliance, more an act of emboldening.”

As we leave the darkening heath, I tell Jake that these works remind me of ‘The Angelic Conversation’, Jarman’s experimental 1985 film. The 80-minute piece (reportedly among the late director’s favourites of his own works) is an abstract exploration of love and desire between two men. Through hazy Super 8 footage, soundtracked by experimental English music group Coil, it observes a pair of mysterious characters as they pass through various landscapes and take part in symbolic interactions. It’s arguably the most painterly of Jarman’s films and is narrated by Judi Dench, who reads 14 sonnets that Shakespeare dedicated to a beautiful young man, the unnamed “Fair Youth.” Like Jake’s images, it’s a pleasant confusion of dream and reality, self and other, past and present.

We’re sitting on the futon that Jake recently brought into the space — handy for when working late turns into sleeping over. To illustrate how his practice has developed in recent years, he pulls out large folios from the drawers of a purpose-built floor-to-ceiling shelving unit. He shows me some of his older experiments on paper. In one A4 gouache study, a loosely rendered reclining nude faces away from the viewer, towards the pale-yellow suggestion of a full moon. Looking at the old works, Jake starts to point out ways in which his work has changed. “Now, I’m keen to make a greater distinction between human and environment. This is very clearly a boy looking at the moon, but I don’t want things to be so easy to unpick,” he says, pausing. “His genitals would be less prominent for starters!”

Jake tells a story from his time at the Royal Drawing School in which a tutor encouraged him to make his nudes’ penises larger. “I decided to do the opposite,” he says, thumbing the corner of the gouache picture. “Leaning into that sexuality is totally valid, and maybe there’ll be a time when I’ll want to be explicitly sexual in my work, but I thought it was important to offer another perspective on queer experience that wasn’t just about sex and sexuality.” Instead, his naked bodies and romantic intimacy in the outdoors give a sense of queer reclamation of the natural world. “I guess it’s a position of honesty,” Jake continues, “to position yourself in a natu¬ral environment in that way. There’s also a level of vulnerability.”

He pulls out a blue A4 folder filled with plastic wallets. Each one is bursting with scraps and fragments. Photographs he’s taken are grouped along¬side images he’s pulled from books and magazines. There are studies in pencil and gouache that show details of leaves and foliage, experiments with light and colour, as well as postcards of landscapes. It’s barely organised chaos. “Each one of these represents a work,” Jake explains, taking out the contents of one wallet and laying it all out on the floor methodically. A photograph of Jake’s mother standing in a wood is repro¬duced a number of times. In one black-and-white version, her body has been replaced via Photoshop with Jake’s own, taken from a nude photo study of himself standing on a chair in his old studio.

Pinned on one wall, there’s a spread from a fashion magazine which shows a photo of a naked woman reclining. Jake’s been using it as a colour study for a painting of two figures kissing (perhaps a work in progress for his next major solo show, slated to open in January 2025 at London’s Studio Voltaire). The photograph’s gloomy sepia palette could have been lifted straight from one of Goya’s Black Paintings, but on close inspection of the caption it turns out to be a picture of porn star Sasha Grey. “It’s never rigid,” Jake explains when I ask how he pulls together all these disparate sources. “Usually I’m drawn to a colour or a shape, as opposed to a specific object or subject. It’s often a case of taking specific elements and eradicating information that’s not useful.” A cursory glance at Jake’s painstaking landscapes might make you mistake him for a plein-air purist, but it turns out his inspirations are as likely to be pornographic as they are bucolic. The layered elements collapse time and generate something new and mesmerising. Behind the branches and beneath the leaves there are unexpected references and personal stories, all waiting to reveal themselves to those curious enough to look a little deeper.

Before I leave, Jake pulls out a Goya book from a personal library that offers a privileged view of his wide range of influences. He places the hardback on the floor and talks me through various techniques and works that have caught his eye. As he flicks slowly through the book, taking in each image as if for the first time, I notice that many of the pages are speckled with paint.