REPRESENTED BY: UNIT LONDON PEARL LAM GALLERY, HONG KONG MODERNISM SAN FRANCISCO

 ABOUT

Damian Elwes paints the rooms where the history of art actually happened. For over three decades, he has built a singular body of work reconstructing the studios of the world's most consequential artists — not as static interiors, but as portals into the moment their vision clicked into place.

His premise is simple and urgent: creativity is humanity's most valuable asset, and the studio is where you can watch it happen. Rather than paint artists or their finished works, Elwes paints the conditions that produced them — the light, the clutter, the half-finished canvases, the objects an artist kept close. He chooses the precise moment an artist was at their most inventive, then reverse-engineers the room around that spark. The result is less biography than forensics of the imagination.

No one else works this way. Elwes' method — equal parts art historian, detective, and painter — has no real precedent, which is exactly what critic Jerry Saltz meant when he called the work Contemporary "because no one else has done this before." It's a practice built on relentless curiosity: extensive archival research, pilgrimages to the studios themselves to study the architecture and the quality of light, and a network of relationships — with Foundations, with families, with the artists themselves — that most painters never bother to build.

That appetite for direct access goes back to the beginning. Rather than attend art school, a young Elwes spent two years walking the streets of Paris, knocking on the doors of working artists and asking to paint their studios. It was his art school — a crash course in technique, medium, and nerve that shaped his voice more than any classroom could have. Along the way, Elwes made his first painting at the urging of Keith Haring. His early graffiti works were then exhibited by London dealer, Robert Fraser, alongside paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

That same tenacity carried through to one of his most ambitious projects: "Picasso's Villa in Cannes," an immersive, large-scale recreation of Villa La Californie in its 1950s heyday. Sydney Picasso personally stepped in to keep the installation intact, convinced museums would eventually want to show it — and she was right. When Le Musée en Herbe brought the work to Paris in 2018, it drew over 100,000 visitors and pulled loans from institutions including the Musée Picasso, with Sydney Picasso attending as guest of honor.

Today, working from his studio in Santa Monica, Elwes continues to travel the world to document living legends — Rose Wylie, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Cy Twombly — while still excavating the studios of history's masters. His recent solo exhibition at the Fubon Museum in Taipei and his 2025 feature in The Wall Street Journal at Art Basel Miami reflect a body of work still expanding: dense with ideas, generous with detail, and unmistakably, energetically his own.

CV

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS:

2026 “Resonance: Symphony of Light, Love and Color” Fubon Art Museum 2024 “Studio Visit” Unit London 2020 “The Room Where It Happened” Unit London 2019 “Artist Studios: From Klimt to Kusama” Modernism, San Francisco 2018 “Secrets of the Studio, Monet to Wei Wei” Museé en Herbe, Paris 2016 “Artist Studios from Giacometti to Kapoor” Serena Morton, London 2016 “Artist Studios from Picasso to Jeff Koons” Modernism, San Francisco 2008 “Creative Spaces: The Studios of Dali, Kahlo, Picasso, Matisse” Lefevre, London 2007 “Artists’ Studios” Scream, London 2006 “Picasso’s Villa La Californie” curated by Fred Hoffman, M&B Fine Arts, L.A.   2004 “The Studios of Matisse, Picasso, Warhol, and Duchamp” Francis Naumann, NY 1999 “Amazon” Robert Berman, L.A. 1998 “Forest of Statues” + “Fallen Tree” Richard Salmon Gallery, London 1992 “Byron Keats and Shelley in Italy” Earl McGrath Gallery, L.A.                                        

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS: 

2026 Art Basel Hong Kong, Pearl Lam Gallery 2025 Art Basel Miami, Pearl Lam Gallery 2025 Art Basel Hong Kong, Pearl Lam Gallery                                                                                                     2022 Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv  2021 “Art and Hope,” USC Fisher Museum, L.A.     2019 “In the Studio, Creation at Work” Musée Eugène-Delacroix/Louvre, Paris     2018  “Independent Vision” Arkansas Arts Center       2015 “Staring Back on Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon” Fleming Museum of Art, VT 2015 “Spark” El Segundo Museum of Art, CA 2010 “The Art of Knowledge” Zimmer Museum of Art, L.A.                                                                          2007 “The Demoiselles Revisited” Francis Naumann, NYC     1984 “Paris/New York” Robert Fraser at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh   (see image below)

ABBREVIATED COLLECTOR’S LIST

MARCIANO ART FOUNDATION FUBON MUSEUM LOUVRE MUSEUM MUSÉE EN HERBE KATRINE BELLINGER COLLECTION HARROW SCHOOL MUSEUM DELACROIX MUSEUM MLT FOUNDATION FLEMING MUSEUM CECIL + MICHAEL PULITZER FOUNDATION MR + MRS STEWART RESNICK CAROL BAYER SAGER + BOB DALY MR + MRS TERRY SEMEL JERRY SALTZ + ROBERTA SMITH ANTONIO BANDERAS ALICE BAMFORD ANNETTE BENING + WARREN BEATTY CANDICE BERGEN PIERCE BROSNAN + KEELY SHAYE SMITH ANDRE BOISSIER JIM CARREY KATHLEEN CHEW WAI LIN LAUREN SHULER DONNER ED FLEUR DANA FOX CYNNE GEORGOULIS ISABEL GOLDSMITH VALERIA GOLINO MR + MRS RICHARD GITLIN MELANIE GRIFFITH OLIVIA HARRISON SIR ANTHONY HOPKINS SIR MICK JAGGER QUEEN NOOR OF JORDAN DODIE KAZANGIAN MR + MRS HARVEY KEITEL MR + MRS JOSEPH KENDALL KERRY KENNEDY MR + MRS FRED HOFFMAN DANNY HUSTON MR + MRS DANIEL LEVY PRINCESS DORA LOEWENSTEIN ASHLEY LONGSHORE MR + MRS ROB LOWE NATALIE MAINES JOHN MACDONALD ALIX + GOFFREDO MARCACCINI ELIZABETH McGOVERN + SIMON CURTIS ELLEN MEYER DEMI MOORE AL PACINO MICHAEL + JODI PRICE RENA RONSEN SALMAN RUSHDIE PRINCESS CLAUDIA RUSPOLI WENDY STARK MARY SULLIVAN TAMMY STROME JOHN STUDZINSKY ELLEN + STEPHEN SUSSMAN MR + MRS DAVID ST JEAN TOBIAS van GILS BRUNO WANG PRINCESS GLORIA VON THURN und TAXIS

PRESS

VOGUE PORTUGUAL APRIL 2024 10 PAINTINGS FEATURED

WHITE HOT MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020

"THE BEST ART IN THE WORLD Pictures From a Pandemic: Damian Elwes

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST

Damian Elwes’ father and grandfather were artists. “They both left me their brushes,” he says. But Elwes, a young Brit, went to Harvard, resolved to write plays. Graffiti was the game-changer. “The paintings on the walls of New York City were alive and metamorphosing every day,” he says. “This was 1984.”

After Harvard, the director, Sidney Lumet, hired him to work on a movie. “My job was crowd control,” Elwes says. One shoot was in Penn Station “I cleared everybody out. And there was Keith Haring, working on black posters with white chalk. I told him that what he was doing looked a lot more interesting than what I was doing.” He and Haring talked graffiti. “He was very approachable and magnanimous,” Elwes says. But Haring insisted that Elwes make a painting before they spoke again.

Elwes soon got another assignment. Lumet’s town house was to be replaced by a skyscraper, so he was out of the place and wanted Elwes to make sure his belongings were safely out too. Done deal. “Next day I realized I had the keys to a double brownstone on West 56th Street,” he says. “I’m so lucky! This is where I can do a painting. As a Brit I was too uncomfortable to go out on the street and paint graffiti, so I painted every day in that building.”

The building was huge, its flat roof was soon covered with Elwes graffiti and highly visible. Word got around and Robert Fraser, a leading London dealer, who was in New York putting together the first UK show about New York graffiti art, was told about this Brit practicioner. The gallerist was skeptical. “There’s no English graffiti artists. There’s no graffiti art in England!”. But he did send his assistant, Gerard Faggionato, to check it out, and he gave the work a thumbs up. “Robert loved my paintings,” Elwes says. A couple of months later Elwes was in the UK for the opening at a major Edinburgh gallery, the Fruitmarket.
 

Elwes then went down to London and met Jean-Michel Basquiat, at his retrospective at the ICA, in which Robert Fraser had a hand. Fraser offered Elwes a graffiti art show on Cork Street, but Elwes was already moving on from this. “I want to tell stories. You can’t tell stories with a spray can,” he told Fraser. “I’m going to go to Paris to learn to paint with a brush”.

Elwes spoke marginal French but hit the Paris pavement running. “On my first day I went to Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir studio,” he says. “And there was nothing there, it was gone. Next day I went to where Matisse had had a studio on the Quai St Michel. That building is still there, but I couldn’t get in past the concierge.” But at the Pompidou Center he chanced upon Picasso and Matisse paintings of their studios alongside each other. “I sat in front of those paintings for several hours. I was crying because I was realizing at that moment how much I loved painting. I loved line, form and color. I guess I was thinking about my grandfather and father being painters and that I was now painting. It was not something that I had really wanted to do. It had just happened.”

BRITISH VOGUE visits Damian’s Colombian Studio

SPEARS MAGAZINE 2017

ELLE MAGAZINE 2018

Paris Museum Show

                                 CRAVE 2016 NYC

Art Critic- Miss Rosen

SF WEEKLY 2016

San Francisco Art Critic Jonathan Curiel

Picasso’s Villa La Californie

Los Angeles Art Historian Fred Hoffman Curator of 2006 Basquiat Retrospective at Brooklyn Museum, MFA Houston + MOCA L.A.

Damian Elwes and the Modernist Heritage

By Fred Hoffman

Central to the Modernist Tradition has been the artist’s concern for the art that has preceded him. One cannot think of Manet without bringing to mind the paintings of Velasquez; one does not think of early Picasso without remembering the work of Cezanne, the Impressionists, and the Symbolists; and one cannot fully digest Roy Lichtenstein without considering his reflections on Monet, Kirchner, Marc, Picasso and the Surrealists.

Damian Elwes has taken this fundamental tenet of modernist practice even further. In focusing on the pictorial re-creation of different Modern painter’s studios, at specific, historically important moments, he has found the means to create a meaningful set of subjects for his own practice as a painter.

While we, the viewer are immediately intrigued and invited to partake of these historical moments, what actually sustains, even heightens our interest, is Damian Elwes’ ability to turn documentation and historical record into compelling pictorial visions requiring repeated viewing and constant deciphering. While we sense that the “scene” unfolding before us is digestible as one clearly defined entity, these works result from a laborious build up, with constant revision and reconsideration of each detail, each piece of information contained within. What is especially interesting, even noteworthy, is that Elwes’ paintings are never the result of information contained in one photograph. Quite the contrary, Elwes spends weeks, even months researching the exact physical details of a scene he is concerned with. In so doing, he is constantly discovering new pieces of information—whether it be the precise layout of an artist’s easels, supplies, tables, chairs, etc.; or in many cases the particular paintings the artist would have had in his studio at any given moment in time.

Elwes’ concern for historical accuracy, and his subsequent investigative process enables his fully realized paintings to have a freshness and immediacy which none of the source material contains nor conveys. It is not, therefore, the fact that he has painted Picasso’s studio that makes Elwes’ work of interest. Rather, it is his ability to use the historical source material about Picasso to achieve some immediacy for his own concerns as a painter. In a way, turning to the practice of a previous artist, combined with intensive investigation and evaluation of that artist’s practice at a given moment in time, results in a great deal of artistic freedom for Elwes’ own practice. With this freedom he is able to express, with a great deal of conviction, even passion, his love for the underlying elements of great painting including composition, color and light. Firmly rooted in these fundamental concerns, Elwes is able to tap into the expressive potential for painting. In the end, it is the expressive quality of these works that we feel drawn to.