“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.”