Spotlight

​​Spotlight Jake Garfield

Championed by Tobias Vernon
The Wick Culture - Jake Garfield, Man In The Museum, 2025
Above  Jake Garfield, Man In The Museum, 2025
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The Wick Culture - Jake Garfield. Photography by Lucy J Toms
Above  Jake Garfield. Photography by Lucy J Toms
Interview
Jake Garfield
Photography
Lucy J Toms
02 April 2025
Interview
Jake Garfield
Photography
Lucy J Toms
02 April 2025
Jake Garfield’s award-winning works can be found in the collections of major institutions, including The British Museum, The Royal Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Pallant House Gallery, and the V&A Museum. Garfield, who lives and works in London, trained in Fine Art Painting at Brighton University, and went on to the Royal Drawing School, where he completed a post-graduate diploma, and the Royal College of Art, where he gained an MA in printmaking. All three mediums – painting, drawing, printmaking – are part of his practice today, where motifs of masks, mirrors and spectators looking at pictures, recur to question the nature of images and reality, artifice and truth.
“Jake reflects on the nature of artifice, selfhood, and the act of making across printmaking, drawing, and painting”, says Garfield’s Champion for The Wick, Tobias Vernon. “I first discovered Jake Garfield’s work at the Royal Academy’s 2023 Summer Exhibition where Garfield’s Man Wrestling An Angel, his iconic enneaptych was on show, inspired by the sculpture Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein”, the gallerist and interior designer added.

Garfield references various art historical and pop cultural sources in other works, too. The artist tells The Wick he draws on the likes of “master colourist Pierre Bonnard, the music of Bob Dylan and films like Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull”. His current exhibition, Man Holding A Snake, at 8 Holland Street’s Flagship Gallery in St James’s Park (until April 12th) revisits Bonnard’s iconic 1931 self-portrait Le Boxeur: portrait de l’artiste, in which the Post-Impressionist painter depicts himself, at that time aged 64, in a boxing pose.

Garfield’s recent series The Boxer, at the centre of the exhibition, is in part a response to the emotions and ideas evoked by Bonnard’s self-portrait, expanding on ideas of masculinity, vulnerability, posturing, and fighting – the shadowy figures in his scenes, use their hands to fight, or display primitive strength, or to make art – the contradictions between creating and destroying that are penetrating in Bonnard’s portrait. Garfield’s monotypes, woodcuts and oil paintings return to his signature palette of deep greens and earthy reds, creating an ambivalent, tense atmosphere, threatening, dangerous but also raw and exposed.

It’s a cohesive and exhilarating body of work that demonstrates Garfield’s maturity as an artist, his mastery of laborious, time-honoured printmaking techniques, and the evolution of his thematic concerns, perennial human themes – mortality, struggle, and the search for our identity in a sea of images. It has taken time and tenacity to get here, though. “I found it challenging leaving art education and not having a secure income, an identity as an artist or much of a plan. It usually takes time to figure things out so patience is really important.”

About the champion

The Wick Culture - Tobias Vernon. Photography by Jasper Fry

Tobias Vernon is a gallerist, interior designer, and the founder of 8 Holland Street. Born in St Ives, he grew up around the work of the likes of Alfred Wallis, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. His passion for art was further deepened through visits to Kettle’s Yard while a student of Art History at Trinity College, Cambridge. 8 Holland Street comprises three distinct galleries: two within London, one in Kensington and the St James’s Park Flagship, as well as the Bath Gallery and Townhouse. The galleries offer an ever-evolving program of exhibitions alongside a carefully curated collection of modern and contemporary artworks, vintage European and Scandinavian furniture, ceramics, textiles, and design. Each gallery space is designed to inspire and provide a platform for discovery. Alongside the galleries, 8 Holland Street Design Studio works on interior design and sourcing projects throughout the UK and abroad.

“Jake reflects on the nature of artifice, selfhood, and the act of making across printmaking, drawing, and painting.”

Place of Birth

London

Education

BA in Fine Art Painting – Brighton (2009-2012), Post Grad scholarship in Drawing – Royal Drawing School (2012-2013), MA in Fine Art Printmaking – Royal College of Art (2014-2016)

Awards, Accolades

Selected as the artist to look out for by London Original Print Fair director Helen Rosslyn. Press: featured in Financial Times, Elle Decoration, Jewish Chronicle, Living etc. and Pallant House Gallery Blog. Prizes: Printmaker’s Council Award, Royal Drawing School Printmaking Prize and Boodle Hatfield Award. Residencies: LA, New York, Scotland, Jersey, St Ives and Tuscany

Current exhibitions

Solo show Man Holding A Snake, 31 January to 12 April 2025 at 8 Holland Street

Spiritual guides, Mentors

The music of Bob Dylan, Jeffrey Lewis and Nina Simone

Advice for a future spotlight

Leave your phone at home!


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