BILL HODGES GALLERY
Born in 1909 in Harlem, Lewis began his career as a Social Realist painter, creating realistic portrayals of Black life in America. In line with other Black artists at the time, Lewis used realism, pastiche, and caricature to reject the racist depictions of Blackness perpetuated by White media outlets. Ultimately, Lewis found this approach unsatisfactory, and transitioned to abstraction in the mid 1940s, following his stint with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). From this experience, Lewis found that through abstraction, Black artists could pursue personal artistic expression and liberation. What resulted was an extensive body of work exploring the vast potential of color and form in a style altogether unique to Lewis’s sensibilities and ingenuity as an artist.
Though not often associated with nature, Lewis used black to explore what he could and could not see in his surroundings. A strong example of this comes from a trip to Crete in 1973, in the form of a series of canvases based on a view of the mountains visible from the artist’s room. In Lewis’s own words, “I saw the contour of that mountain change, just from the sun. At night the damn thing disappeared but I knew it was out there,” inciting the artist to ask, “what the hell can I do with this form at night?” These paintings demonstrate how the artist’s experiences were tied to his work, and connected through his referential titles. These particular works can be best described as atmospherics; the artist used paint to depict mist or air as a means to record the relationship of objects with light and the world. In "Ighia Galini", ca. 1974, the black canvas overwhelms any other colors present in the composition. Named after the town in Crete which the artist and his wife stayed, the painting loosely resembles a view of the seascape. Using a dry brush technique, Lewis rubbed white paint into the black canvas, its faintness creating an allusion of a distant organic form, either clouds or a mountain. The horizontal patch of blue in the left corner is reminiscent of the village’s jagged shoreline, loosely articulating the distant horizon line of the seascape. This painting is very sparse and abstract, and thus, relies on its title to provide meaning. Without the title referencing the exact town Lewis stayed in, the paint would not transform quite as poetically or adeptly into an evocative seascape.
Ighia Galini, ca. 1974
Norman Lewis
oil on canvas
54 ⅝ x 78 in.
(138.7 x 298.1 cm)
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Contact
Bill Hodges Gallery
529 W. 20th Street, #10E
New York, NY 10011
(212) 333-2640
May 2–5, 2024
4 Great Jones St., 3rd + 4th Fl, New York, 10012
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