Shapeshifting

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.

Shapeshifting

Following on from Shapeshifting: From Animal to Human at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch, in the summer of 2009 Lewis held a solo exhibition at Christie’s South Kensington, where a continuance of Shapeshifting: From Animal to Human introduced his new exploration of the male figure. In addition to this exhibition, Lewis had great success with a solo auction titled Predators and Prey at Christie’s London in 2007, in which a selection of the last editions of his animal bronzes went under the hammer.

Through this exhibition’s carefully selected series of non-chronological works and installations, it became possible to trace 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.

Lewis’s new male figures were first shown on an international platform at Christie’s South Kensington with this exhibition.