Tony Lewis

Untitled, 2023
Graphite and rubber cement on paper
38 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches (97.79 X 77.47 cm)

Courtesy of Tony Lewis, Olney Gleason

Tony Lewis expands the conceptual and material possibilities of drawing in a practice that spans large-scale works on paper, sculpture, collages, digital projections, and site-specific installations. With materials such as powdered graphite, pencil, torn paper, and a range of handmade and found surfaces, Lewis' practice is deliberately one of intense exertion. In this steadfast application of unruly materials, the artist's mark-making is an embodiment of labor. Lewis' physical manipulation of visual systems of language, his layering, erasure and distortion, results in a distinct visual vocabulary.

Over the past decade, Lewis has developed methods for collapsing the space between drawing and writing, treating the Roman alphabet, Gregg shorthand notation, and found texts as formal elements to be appropriated, distorted, and reconstituted. Lewis has used shorthand notation - a phonetic writing system that translates speech into curving, bisecting lines - as a generative tool throughout his practice.

This drawing is part of Lewis’ Shorthand series where stenographic marks read as gestural abstraction to viewers unfamiliar with the notation, while encoding specific language for those who can decipher it.

Lewis lives and works in Chicago, IL. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art(2023); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2017); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2015). He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was the 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence at the Rose Art Museum. In 2025, the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, invited Lewis to participate in the exhibition What drawing can be: four responses, where he presented several new works including a site-specific commission.

His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, among others.