New Directions
RICHARD LEWER
2016 has been a bumper year for Melbourne artist Richard Lewer. Not only was he awarded the prestigious $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize (for The Theatre of Sports, his heartwrenching portraits of a dozen national sporting ‘failures’), but was also selected for the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial, held a solo show in Sydney at Sullivan+Strumpf gallery and installed a major body of work for the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Sappers and Shrapnel exhibition which is on display until 29 January 2017.
Lewer’s art practice over the past year has taken him from the trenches of World War One, to a remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia; he has worked with artists with mental and physical disabilities and with indigenous elders. A visual storyteller at heart, he is drawn to extremes in human behavior, creating portraits of everyday characters going in extreme circumstances, often struggling with the vicissitudes of life.
Raw and expressionistic in style, the artist employs a smorgasbord of materials in his work, from paintings on pegboards, frayed foam cushions, sandpaper, laminex and even a billiard table baize.
For his most recent project at the Art Gallery of South Australia, he reinvented his art practice yet again, creating a series of six three dimensional dioramas, based on those at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, alongside two massive painted portraits in steel. The subject matter depicted the grim conditions of life in the trenches in World War One.
His Dobell entry focused similarly on the theme of human vulnerability, drawing a series of portraits of people afflicted by varying degrees of mental illness (of which he included himself as a subject).
In March this year, Lewer will participate feature in Sydney’s blockbuster exhibition The National: New Australian Art 2017 presented across three premier Sydney art institutions (Carriageworks, the MCA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales). He will present an animated projection based on the story of John Pat, whose death in 1984 helped trigger the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. This will be followed by two overseas shows – one at Gow Langsford in Auckland in May and a second with Sullivan+Strumpf’s premises in Singapore in August. To top it off, he is currently training in ceramics at a studio in Brunswick, in order to make a series of ceramic crucifixes for the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair in 2017.
So where will all this artistic experimentation lead him? Ultimately, for this social observer, the style and materials employed are secondary to the story he is conveying. Lewer states that,
“My influences are the people that I meet, whether it’s an exorcist priest, or a criminal or a fortune teller or an Aboriginal elder. It really is those interactions with those people that give me the desire to make the work.”
