Type of Auction or Exhibition: Solo Exhibition

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Everard Read takes pleasure in presenting this exhibition of new Cat sculptures by Dylan Lewis.

After a period focusing his attention on the human condition Lewis has with this collection circled back to the subject that has long entranced collectors of figurative bronzes. Lewis’s felids, from the first bronzes in the early 1990s, have interrogated the essence of perhaps the most beautiful and graceful of all terrestrial creatures. His sculptures of leopards, tigers, cheetahs, lions and domestic cats are informed by an ancient lineage honed through millions of years of inexorable environmental change. Structure and an economy of lithe movement camouflage an ability to focus awesome explosive energy. Such is the nature of the animal that has obsessed this very rare sculptor from his formative years.

This exhibition of bronzes from miniatures to monumental, will remind collectors internationally that Dylan Lewis is the most profound animalier of his time.

– Mark Read

Selected works are available for viewing at Everard Read Johannesburg and Cape Town.

CHTHONIOS
From the Greek [ khthon,’ground, earth’] + [-ios,’of’]

Emerging out of a seven-year period of inspired productivity and emotional turbulence, ‘CHTHONIOS’ finds sculptor Dylan Lewis in an extended moment of introspection and reckoning. The artist’s present preoccupation sees him grappling with the emotional tensions and complexities of human relationships, while striving towards reconnection with his sense of self. This journey has brought Lewis down a number of avenues, which converge on the current exhibition as a whole.

Venturing between visceral abstraction, frank eroticism, bold exuberance, wholesale embracing of the human figure, and a move away from the fragmentary and the isolated, Lewis has imbued this new exhibition with a markedly different energy and confidence than earlier work. ‘CHTHONIOS’ finds him returning to the themes that defined his earlier sculptures, albeit in a fresh and assured new guise.

In ‘CHTHONIOS’ Dylan Lewis utilises ideas of nature and wildness to reflect on the often-painful process of self-actualisation. Inspired by writers such as Joseph Campbell, Jay Griffiths, and Robert Bly, this body of work channels the agony and ecstasy of the chthonic; a Jungian concept of the darker underbelly of the psyche, which must be confronted and consolidated if one is to achieve a true sense of self. The term derives from the Greek khthonios.

While not a direct quotation by any means, the landslide of human forms in many of Dylan Lewis’s ‘CHTHONIOS’ sculptures seem to recall the histrionic quality of Auguste Rodin’s monumental magnum opus The Gates of Hell. Lewis’s swirling vortex of bodies – unquestionably one of the most striking pieces of work the artist has ever produced – speaks to the painful struggle of individuation and the battle of relating to others in a shared space of irreconcilability and schism.

Lewis, like Rodin before him, is drawn to this symbolism because of the evocative imagery rather than any religious allegory; his work eschews (and indeed rejects) any notion of Divine Judgement. Instead, Lewis asserts that these structures of meaning are human constructs, while often beautiful they can also be devastating in seeking to deny the full spectrum of human complexity. Lewis’s new monumental animalistic sculptures – where male and female figures appear to emerge from a trio of muscular animal limbs – serve to emphasise the interrelated balancing act of the three psychic agents (ego, id, and superego) in order to move beyond the constricting grip of repressed traumas into the freedom of unconscious instinctual energies.

This dynamic is further explored in another new series, where conventionally academic busts are juxtaposed with the swarming mass of conflicting passions that flow from within them. Mirroring a metaphorical search for the ‘wild twin’, the wall-mounted relief works of the Spoor series are a direct engagement with the automatic unconscious, a vessel for raw, unfiltered emotion and a testament to corporal experience. Leaping between the realms of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, these works are inspired by Dylan Lewis’s encounters with spoor in nature: traces of animal tracks, scents and broken foliage which indicates the presence of an animal in a particular area.

While many of the works in ‘CHTHONIOS’ are permeated with a sense of longing, of striving for connection, Lewis’s most recent human figures represent an uncontained release of libidinal energies. They are actualised entities not just in the sense that they are fully articulated sculpturally, but in that they are effusively imbued with agency. They represent a wholesale celebration of the Dionysiac.

Ultimately, the journey of reconnecting with what has been lost is the overarching theme that runs through all of the ‘CHTHONIOS’ artworks. The raw physicality in Lewis’s sculptural reveries is very much a part of that, as are the figures fraught in existential and introspective conflicts. Following three decades of artistic practice – including countless commissions and shows, a sculpture garden, and three solo exhibitions at Christie’s – the sculptures, busts and reliefs that make up ‘CHTHONIOS’ may well represent the first time that Dylan Lewis truly feels at home in his voice.

CIRCA Cape Town
Ulundi House, 3 Portswood Road, V&A Waterfront +27 21 418 4527 | ctgallery@everard.co.za www.everard-read-capetown.co.za

Mon to Fri 09.00 – 18.00 Sat 09.00 – 13.00

Walk-about 10:30 Saturday 29 February 2020

With Untamed Lewis has, for the first time, collaborated with two other masters in their fields: Ian McCallum, an author, poet, psychiatrist, psychologist and wilderness guide, and Enrico Daffonchio, an architect who specialises in sustainable design.

The fulchrum of the exhibition is Daffonchio’s pavilion, a structure showcasing contemporary, sustainable design and employing solar power and light as energy sources. (A notable feature of the pavilion is the specially designed “living wall” of indigenous plants, highlighting the Kirstenbosch horticultural team’s world-renowned talents.) Here visitors can view a selection of Lewis’s sculptures, including the maquettes of monumental works that the sculptor has placed in specifically chosen areas of the garden, while engaging with the powerful narrative of wilderness and its importance to the human psyche through poetic word installations by Ian McCallum. From the pavilion, they can set out on a walking trail that takes in the various sculpture sites.

From the very earliest phases of Lewis’s career, he has exhibited continuously in partnership with the Everard Read Gallery, both in Cape Town and in Johannesburg. This exhibition saw the sculptor showing his monumental male figures for the first time, and thus is a significant milestone for him.

The scale of Everard Read Johannesburg was imminently suited to showing these monumental works indoors.

The horn skull mask worn by this large figure is reminiscent of the archetypal horned god found in several ancient mythologies, including Celtic and Hindu, the most well-known of which must be the Greek, where he is Pan. But this is not to say that Lewis is faithfully recreating only a mythical figure here. Instead, he invests a mortal man with those qualities evoked by the horned god archetype.

The ideas touched on in this exhibition are being further explored in Untamed, a collaborative project between Lewis, architect Enrico Daffoncio and psychologist, psychiatrist, wildlife guide and poet Ian McCallum. Untamed is on at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town until June 2011.

From Animal to Human at the Rupert Museum was an exhibition that traced Lewis’s personal and artistic development. The exhibition contextualised all of the sculptor’s work and elucidated the new direction Lewis took after having focused on the animal form for the past 15 years. The carefully selected series of non-chronological works and installations of Shapeshifting traced and illustrated the threads underlying Lewis’s progression from wilderness, to animal, to fragmented animal forms, to the human/animal interface embodied in his latest figure work. Through this exhibition it became clear that his recent exploration of the human form was not the radical shift in focus it may have appeared to be. Instead, this shift in subject matter became seen as a natural progression of the sculptor’s artistic journey and personal philosophy.

An important moment in Lewis’s progression towards the human figures he is currently working on was Leopard and Serpent, which breaks from realism and enters a more abstract, mythical realm. The abstraction is particularly evident in the compositional elements of this piece, and there is also a discernible trace of the influence of sculptors Antoine Louis Barye (1796 – 1875) and Rembrandt Bugatti (1884 – 1916)

As with many Dylan Lewis exhibitions, Shapeshifting included a series of outreach programmes to which local school children were invited.

With Predators and Prey, Dylan Lewis brought a selection of 23 of his animal sculptures to his home town of Stellenbosch, a well-conserved historical gem of cultural significance in the heart of the Cape Winelands. These animal works were placed in an urban, public arena, furthering Lewis’s interest in reaching a broad public. The sculptures worked as an evocative reminder of an often overlooked aspect of this cultural centre’s natural history, for several of these animals once roamed the area freely.

Unlike a gallery setting, sculptures in a bustling urban centre has the benefit of reaching people from all walks of life and across all race, class and socio-economic strata.

The natural beauty of Stellenbosch and its surrounding mountains provided a beautiful backdrop for the sculptures. It was particularly fitting because the sculptor spends much time walking these mountains and they are his major source of inspiration. Interestingly, leopard are still found in this rugged landscape.