Jake Atree - Online Exhibition

Jake Attree
3 – 26th February 2021

This major exhibition of new paintings by contemporary British artist Jake Attree has moved from Messum’s London gallery to a virtual online platform at www.messums.com during lockdown. The online exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated printed catalogue (£15) with foreward by critic and author David Boyd Haycock, a short film with commentary from David Messum as he explores the paintings and a virtual gallery allowing visitors to experience the complete exhibition.

“In Jake Attree’s art, I see Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Auerbach synthesized and made into something new, both lyrical and melancholy. In these pictures experience, care, and devotion merge art and life—without any fanfare or sensation—in unfolding perceptions of what is possible, what is lost, what is dreamt of and what is regained. He is the Spencer Gore of our age.”
Alexander Nemerov author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin, 2021)

The works in this exhibition have advanced upon stylistic developments which were seen in Attree’s earlier exhibitions with Messum’s. The small blocks of colour that characterised many of the works from the ‘Ancient City’ series exhibited in 2013 have moved in an ever-increasing abstract direction, hovering at times on the cusp of complete abstraction.

“Picture fuses with place, and place with picture, in a cyclical relationship that serves to produce something entirely new and very personal.”
David Boyd Haycock Author and Curator

Attree was born and grew up in York. This majestic city has a long, extraordinary history – from the Roman metropolitan centre to the Viking port of Yorvik, to the great medieval walls and minster. Here is layer upon layer of history and those seams of history are like the layers in Attree’s drawings and his paintings. Recent works such as the ‘Red Roofs, York from the Bar Walls’ series, both a vision of York, a place that both ancient and modern.