Dale Lewis: Lost Illusions

Opening reception | Thursday 4 June, 6 – 8pm

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Lost Illusions, an exhibition of new paintings by Dale Lewis, the artist’s fourth with the gallery and his first solo show in London in five years. Working at scale in a mixture of acrylic, oil and spray paint, Lewis’ paintings continue a line of enquiry into the social fabric of contemporary life underpinned by the themes that have always animated his work: class, national identity, sex, labour, mental health, nature and technology.

Whilst Lewis’ oeuvre to date has been defined by the artist’s sardonic wit and a specifically British sense of bleak humour, the works in this exhibition are sincere in their candidness. Their subjects - his own deceased grandfather, a friend of his family, an ex-boyfriend's father, Lewis himself - are delicately rendered, implicating the artist in honest depictions of everyday life. 

Placing images within images, Lewis uses compositional techniques like posters stuck to a bedroom wall or a custom-printed fleece blanket to make dizzying leaps of association, building up dense references to current events and the artist’s lived experiences. Leaving surfaces intentionally bare in places rather than overworked, Lewis moves deftly between impasto layers of paint and raw, unprimed canvas; elsewhere found fabric is deployed as a spray-paint stencil, or carved linoleum is used as a stamp. Saccharine pinks, viridian green and cool titanium white recur, drawing formal connections between works, whilst other paintings take the patternings of ladybirds, patchwork quilts and advent calendars as points of departure. 

At the exhibition’s center is The Bell (2025), a large-scale painting of a Christmas tree with baubles and decorations hanging from its dripping branches. Vertiginous in its composition, the work depicts a surreal mixture of scenes and figures, both real and imagined, seen by the artist as he drove through his hometown in Essex in 2025, at the height of nationalist protest action against hotels used as asylums for migrants in the UK. The work introduces Lewis’ use of compositions-within-compositions as a pictorial device, allowing simultaneous perspectives and nonlinear narratives to link and unlink across the picture plane. Like rabbit holes, each bauble is a perfectly formed capsule of hysterical anger, malaise or disaffection; TOWIE icon Gemma Collins rubs shoulders with a masked protestor holding a lit flare, whilst a man wearing a red cap that says Make Epping Great Again wields a large wooden cross like a stake. Taken together, an incisive portrait of modern Britain emerges, unified by Lewis’ totemic tree and its meticulously stamped branches. 

Through Lewis’ depictions of the private made public, the mundanity of everyday desperation - and the ways we maneuver around it - comes into focus. It is Lewis’ implication in these works that enlivens them, his admissions of guilt which become our own. Speaking of one portrait, Horizon (2025), Lewis states that the work “can also be seen as an abstract landscape, or horizon, to which collectively - as groups or individuals, dead or alive, as organic matter - we’re all part of the layering of time.” 

For any press enquiries, please email Athena Diego (athena@edelassanti.com).

Dale Lewis, The Bell, 2025. Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, 78.7 x 118.1 in. © Dale Lewis. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti