01 February 2018 In “Family Fortunes” the artist is served up for Christmas dinner while the goose and pork stand in as guests. In “Club Tropicana” a multi-ethnic checkout line at Morrison’s spills into a fantasy of exoticism contrasted with nine-to-five drudgery. “Devil’s Juice”, referencing Luca Signorelli’s 16th-century fresco “The Damned Cast to Hell”, reimagines a pub brawl as a dynamic formal play of overlapping bodies in spiralling red and black. All the new works here – stark large-scale grotesque narratives in thick impasto and bold stabbing strokes contrasting with broad areas of raw canvas – establish Lewis as an original urban visionary, in a warm, comic British tradition going back to Hoga
1 February 2018
