August 22 - September 26, 2026
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Fuzzy Felt, an upcoming solo exhibition by England-based artist Joseph Carway. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery following two successful art fairs, and group show inclusion.
Spiral Sleeper - 11.75 x 7.75 in
“I have always said I’m trying to make myself confused. But maybe I’m trying to feel awe; when I see an image, it takes me back to my deep aesthetic projections of what life would be like when I grew up, I could dream much bigger than life could offer, there were emotions packaged up in images that I am still waiting to find in the real world. It doesn’t come, it doesn’t exist here. The narratives at play can’t ever be achieved in real life - the relationships I see in and between figures in paint far outperform the organic majesty of ‘life’”
Self Portrait of Self Portrait – 13 × 17 in
Untitled 13 – 15.75 x 11.75 in
Standing Figures outside of Carway’s Norwich Studio
An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition.
You must get close to Joseph Carway’s work to enter his world, which is ever so gently bewildering. The dimensions—often plywood the size of an A4 sheet of paper—lend themselves to such intimacy. A vestige from his earliest days of sketching out ideas as tattoo flash art, the size is also pragmatic formally. Within the bounds of its surface, Carway creates intimacy: like watching a tiny television set with your face one inch from the screen, or a condensed, private theater staged for an audience of one.
You may call it folk art, or art brut, or naive art if you would like to trace kinship. Carway does indeed cherish found objects and collect old folk pieces, finding them refreshingly simple and unaffected. He admires the rudimentary toy a parent makes for a child, its unskilled roughness paired with intuition. He admires that a tattoo can be read as folksy and avant garde in its own secret way—the way ink softens and spreads into ambiguous blurs fascinates him as much as the tattoo’s power to convey ideas from a small box of symbolic tricks. He admires, too, the work of the French Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard: the flatness of pattern, the condensing of textures in a small space, just as Carway’s own work compresses a scene until there is no longer a difference between the figure and the field it stands in.
Untitled 29 – 15.75 x 11.75 in