Luke Elwes (b.1961) lives and works in London. His early years were spent in Tehran, where the light and terrain were a formative influence. He studied at UAL (Camberwell school of Art) and holds undergraduate and research degrees from Bristol University and University of London. He worked briefly at Christie’s following graduation, and after meeting Bruce Chatwin in 1987 he went to the central Australian desert to study the landscape and its place in indigenous storytelling and artforms. Since then he has spent extended periods of time travelling and working in India, Asia and North Africa. In 1998 he was artist in residence on an expedition to Mount Kailash in western Tibet, and returned to the Himalayas in 2008 to explore the remote kingdom of Mustang.
Since 2000 Luke Elwes has alternated his time in the London studio with long periods spent out on location, making works on paper in combination with the elements that record a fragile shifting world. Beginning with the Osea series, created over the course of a decade on a small island off the East Anglian coast, in recent years he has gone on to make significant bodies of work on paper during residencies in the USA, at the Vermont Studio Center (2013) and the Albers Foundation in Connecticut (2015). In 2022 he was visiting fellow at the Ballinglen Art Foundation (Ireland).
Since 1990 his work has been shown regularly in private and public galleries in the UK, US and Europe, including: Frestonian Gallery (London), Adam Gallery (London), Broadbent (London), Art First Contemporary (London), Browse & Darby (London), Art First (New York), Galerie Vieille du Temple (Paris), Galerie Marceau Bastille (Paris), Grand Palais (Paris), Palazzo Lanfranchi (Pisa), Galleria Ceribelli (Milan & Bergamo), Galleria Ghelfi (Vicenza). In 2022 he showed alongside Bridget Riley at the Myung-Won Museum in Seoul, South Korea.
He has participated in survey and group shows at the following UK institutions: Royal Academy London, Christie’s London, Barbican Gallery London, National Trust, Estorick Collection London, Kettles Yard Cambridge, Southampton Art Gallery, Bury Art Gallery Manchester, Young Gallery Salisbury, Minories Colchester. He has curated a number of exhibitions in the UK and Europe and was invited to give an ‘Artist’s Eye’ talk at the National Gallery in 2011. He has also written periodically about contemporary art for journals including Modern Painters, Royal Academy Magazine, Galleries Magazine, Abstract Critical and other digital platforms.
The idea of a journey is central to his painting, both its physical and temporal unfolding and its recollection in memory. The surfaces recall maps, tracing the marks of history and the fragile signs of belief, and moving between what is revealed and concealed of these often silent and increasingly threatened terrains. Rooted in the particular, the images also probe an interior space. The art critic Andrew Lambirth has written about them: ‘The map is nearly erased, a distressed palimpsest; it is difficult to decipher a single clear meaning. The viewer must, like a scryer, read the signs and interpret accordingly’. More recently the writer Robert Macfarlane has described how ‘they hover between encryption and archetype, enigma and fabulous openness’.
Elwes’s territory is both familiar and strange, distant and yet somehow known. As the French philosopher-poet Gaston Bachelard wrote in Poetics of Space, “We cover the universe with drawings we have lived.” The thinly layered surfaces echo patterns of weather and erosion; marks are made then washed away or erased. Ancient pathways across plains, deserts or fields are suggested to create, as Elwes has said, “spaces which are mapped by belief rather than measured by science”. These pathways are markers in the emptiness of the canvas, making sense of the space as they also attempt to make sense of the world.
Sue Hubbard, The Independent, 2004
Luke Elwes’ paintings do not paint the river, but are made of the river. Their form is that of the contingent, of the point of indiscernibility between what simply is and the one (here, the painter) for whom it is. What interests Elwes is the recording of the moment in which something emerges and immediately sinks into the past, “the shifting patterns on the water, the fall of light on a given day, and the incidental life that passes across one’s visual field. Beneath all this, there is also the delicate registering of material erasures, the disappearances and the brief resurgences, the momentary recollection of this place’s silent past”. The Ganges River series, in particular, captures a landscape that “not only continues to escape, but transgresses and confuses the sacred and the profane, the everyday and the unheard of, the mythical and the real.”
Giorgio Agamben, What is Landscape?, 2019
