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 bleak humour, the works in Lost Illusions 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.
Lewis places images within images as a compositional strategy, using 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. Surrounding the intertwined subjects of The Strawberry Thief (2025) are pieces of ephemera and posters taken from Lewis’ bedroom: a Korean print of female farmers, a Greek saint of nursing and wine gesturing upwards towards a glass, and a can of K cider. Lewis moves deftly between layers of impasto 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, canary yellow 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 centre is The Bell (2025), a 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.
Placed in and around the larger works are smaller paintings: like punctuation marks or footnotes, they act as auxiliaries to the more narrative works, isolating a single metaphor or formal device. Drawing on studies in horticulture Lewis undertook at Capel Manor College in Enfield during this period, his depictions of moths and butterflies present nature as a psychological refuge from the trenchant social observations of his larger works. Through subtle symbolism, they explore patterns of labour, romance, and climate change’s impact on the natural environment. In Kiss Goodbye (2026), two extinct species, the Essex Emerald Moth and the Black-Veined White Butterfly, evoke the fleeting crossover of a couple working alternate day and night shifts. Meeting each other only once a day, they hover in inky darkness, their bodies just touching, distilled into their contrasting colours of viridian green and opalescent white.
Through Lewis’ depictions of the private made public and the complexity of inner life, the mundanity of everyday desperation comes into focus. Lewis’ implication in the works in Lost Illusions enlivens them through relatable admissions of guilt, pleasure or boredom. In the artist’s words: ‘These paintings are about going back to the beginning; back to the beginning of painting, but also back to the beginning of yourself.’
Dale Lewis: Lost Illusions will be open for London Gallery Weekend from 5 – 7 June 2026. For any press enquiries, please contact 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.
