Damian Elwes

Damian Elwes began his artistic career as a graffiti artist in the 1980s, before being convinced to turn to painting by the renowned street and pop artist Keith Haring. In 1984, Elwes’s first painted works were displayed alongside those of Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He became drawn to representations of artists’s studios, moving to Paris in the late 1980s where he sought out studios for artistic material. Elwes’s career took a turn when he moved to the edge of the Columbian rainforest and began representing expansive images of the surrounding nature. Following the advent of the internet, Elwes was then able to access imagery of the studios of famed artists, such as Picasso and Matisse. Now, his works serve as visual documents of these creative spaces that have been lost to history. In 2019, Elwes’s studio paintings were displayed alongside works by Eugène Delacroix in order to showcase and explore the artistic process.

 Elwes’s early experiences of painting contemporary artists’s studios in Paris led him to understand the figure of the artist through his or her belongings and the specific placement of these belongings. For Elwes, the artist’s studio and its contents were emblematic of the essence of an artistic personality. When Elwes was later able to gain online access to imagery of the studios of iconic 20th-century artists, he viewed these images as puzzle pieces and began to bring them together to create complete representations of these creative spaces. Many of these spaces no longer exist today, after being taken over by new owners. Elwes’s paintings have therefore taken on a commemorative dimension; they are detailed tangible records that transport the viewer into the inner sanctum of the creative mind.