Artists

Spencer Lewis

Press release

‘The works are rough, sketchy and there were no limits,’ says American artist Spencer Lewis talking about his latest works, which are characterised by a tremendous sense of experimentation and a powerful gestural interpretation. These works were produced during a stay of several weeks as part of the SoArt artists-in-residence at Lake Millstatt in the Austrian federal province of Carinthia in summer 2024; they debut at Lewis’s first extensive solo exhibition at the Gallery in AM SEE.

Lewis’s painterly exploration expresses itself in the interplay of color, of abstraction and figuration, of various media and formats. Large works on watercolor paper are the focal point of this body of work, literally absorbing the lake itself. Indeed, the roll of paper was first dipped into the lake water and then smoothed out in anticipation of the artist’s application of vibrant lines, patches of color and trickling traces of paint overlaid to form an expressive structure of interwoven layers. The delight Lewis takes in experimentation is immediately apparent in his works: when, for example, colors such as bright pink contrast with lush green, when lines end abruptly only to re-emerge elsewhere, or when rivulets of paint resonate with the physical gestures that produced them. These individual elements might appear random, but instead they combine to create dynamic images that convey a vivid presence and vibrancy. Lewis adopts a similar interplay of divergent colors and shapes in his oil and acrylic paintings. There is even a hint of Dadaism blended into these works, with the inclusion of a word here and there. WAS WO? or WO WAS I, German words that Lewis picked up while in residence that also mean something for him in English; in ways not dissimilar to a comic strip, they appear to comment on the events unfolding in the paintings.