Tony Lewis

Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Chicago. Lewis’ practice focuses on the relationship between semiotics and language to confront social and political topics such as race, power, communication, and labour. Lewis creates drawings using graphite, pencil and paper, mediums the artist uses to trace and develop abstract narratives and reflections on the notion of the gestural. By pushing the boundaries of drawing and the possibilities of abstraction, he expands the use of the “material” of language. As expressed by Melissa Chiu, Director of Hirshhorn Museum: ‘Lewis has quickly established himself in the contemporary art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction, and his monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging, and erasing text, he shifts the way we move through language to open up new and unexpected readings’. Lewis' work is in the permanent collections of The Zabludowicz Collection, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others. Lewis participated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.