Tony Lewis (b. 1986)

Building on the investigations into racial issues of artists like Glenn Ligon, David Hammons and Rashid Johnson, Tony Lewis has recently gained increased institutional recognition. Despite his very young age, his work has already been included in the Whitney Biennial in 2014, was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Cleveland, and has been shown in an impressive number of gallery exhibitions. The present work Say ‘’Thank You’’ a lot. is a great example of the artist’s floor drawings, which are created with graphite on paper. Focusing on graphite powder as a basic material element, Say ‘’Thank You’’ a lot. perfectly encapsulates the balance between the content and form, the material and the political, making Tony Lewis’ drawings amongst the most fascinating and interesting of his generation. Using some of the most rudimentary and fundamental tools, the work hovers between ghostly ethereality and grounded immediacy.

Lewis’ floor drawings begin as graphite-coated paper floor coverings for entire rooms: after their initial installation, they are pulled up and compressed into sculptural objects, which are transformed each time they are exhibited, accumulating marks, creases and tears. The artist covers the entire floor with paper, secures it with masking tape straight up to the wall, then once it’s secured, he paints on top of the paper. Executed as large-scale wall-drawings, floor installations, sculptures or large sheets pinned to the wall, Lewis’ ideas are expressed through the messy, physical language of graphite that constantly leaves behind traces of the artist’s presence. As Kevin Nance observes: 'The graphite [in Lewis's drawings] spreads everywhere and the work’s conceptual underpinnings, the interrogation of race, is metaphorically conveyed in the material contamination (…) nothing is clean, crisp, nor clear in his large-scale drawings. And nothing is absolute in contemporary racial politics' (M. Grabner quoted in K. Nance, Chicago’s Young Artists: What Does the Future Behold, Chicago Gallery News, 2013).