NYAB Event - Norman Lewis “Canvas”

Norman Lewis “Canvas”

Bill Hodges Gallery

This event has ended.

Bill Hodges Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Norman Lewis at its new Chelsea location. The show features eight paintings created by the artist from the 1950s to the 1970s. Several of the works in the exhibition have not been shown in over a decade, including Seachange XIII (1977), No. 5 (1973), and two matching paintings titled The Awakening (1969) and “2” Awakening (1969).

The exhibition at Bill Hodges Gallery coincides with an opening at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts in November 2015, the first comprehensive overview of Norman Lewis’ work - “a pivotal
figure in American art, a participant in the Harlem art community, an innovator of Abstract
Expressionism, and a politically-conscious activist.” Paintings, drawings, and prints by Norman
Lewis are shown internationally, gracing many of the most prestigious art collections in the world.

In the United States, Lewis’ work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Gallery of Art, and The Smithsonian American Art Museum.
From the late 1940s, Norman Lewis moved toward a gestural type of abstraction, an expressive style of action painting in stark opposition to the figurative and narrative-based conventions of his early work commissioned by the government funded Works

Progress Association. In the 1960s, he joined artists such as Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Reginald Gammon to form an abstract painter’s group named Spiral, meeting each week in one of their Greenwich Village studios. Upon returning to New York from a short-lived relocation in California in the late 1960s, Lewis served as a teacher and supervisor at the Harlem Youth in Action, eventually instructing at the Art Students League in his final years and receiving grants in the 1970s from the Mark Rothko Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The style of Norman Lewis is often hazy and textured; the marks of his brushes are both articulated over and buried into his lushly worked surfaces. Serpentine (1970) is a painting on canvas exhibiting a large, s-shaped area in which rich and desaturated reds mingle with variations of blue, their contrast creating a colorful dynamism. Lewis often provided thoughtful titles for his work, in this case, named for the electrified body of a slithering snake. New Moon (1959) also takes a descriptive label, in reference to a small crescent moon just off center of the composition floating in a heavy fog of black paint rubbed into the canvas. The application of paint creates a darkness that bleeds off at the bottom edge into a black infinity woven with Lewis’ signature markings.

One of Lewis’ later oil paintings on canvas, Seachange XIII (1977), calls to mind the clouded mist of natural transformation, presenting an archaic swirling pool of abstracted water and air in saturated blues. Similar to other works in
The work conjures an image of renewal, the first sparks of existence within the serenity of an unbothered sea.