Andrew Lewis: Au bonheur des femmes

Art : Concept presents Andrew Lewis‘s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. With this new series based on Emile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des dames, the British artist, whose ancestors hail from Barbados, continues to explore the renewal and relevance of genre painting.

Born in 1968 in London, Andrew Lewis lives and works in Argenton-sur-Creuse. He develops the idea of interaction between characters both human or sculpted and their immediate environment, which tends to create a group dynamic. His works show all the innovation and ingenuity that we’ve had to use to develop within the bosom of society which in turn has begun to function like an organism abolishing its own privileges, thus breaking the codes that it had eagerly created not so long before. Andrew Lewis intends to make an original synthesis between the painterly transposition of calm and hieratic characters and time in its most fleeing, mobile and evolving aspects. His figures evoke Robert Musil’s ones. They are men and woman without evident “qualities” who, once freed of the sediments of their own milieu and epoch, become extremely sensitive to all experiments and act as a sort of trans-historic multiple conscience.