Richard Lewer
Congratulations to Richard Lewer, winner of the 5th Basil Sellers Art Prize!
Now in its final year, the Basil Sellers Art Prize is a $100,000 acquisitive prize, with a focus on the theme of ‘art and sport’. The exhibition creates a mutual appreciation between the two, providing a platform for artists to discuss issues that impact sporting culture. The Theatre of Sports is a large 12 panel piece presenting Lewer’s dedication and passion, examining the close relationships between sport, mental illness and failure.
Samantha Comte The Theatre of Sports
“Art and sport are not so different: “both are public spectacles that reflect society and depend on paying customers. The only real difference lies in the uncertainty of the outcome.”1 If you attend the theatre you will generally know, unlike a sporting event, the result in advance. The fascination with watching sport is the unknown. The drama is often in the moment of winning or losing – a remarkable turn-around, the tragic downfall of the top team or a heart-breaking career-ending injury. Sport, like theatre, can reveal so much about who we are – our fears, our capacity for resilience and our need to belong.
Richard Lewer’s The Theatre of Sports (2016) is a compendium of twelve paintings that form one work. It represents Lewer’s sustained passion for art and sport, and examines the role sport can play in relation to mental illness. His practice looks at extremes of behaviour, centering in this work on the very public moments of failure of well-known sporting figures.
Fascinated by the highly publicised story of swimmer Ian Thorpe’s struggle with depression, Lewer started to investigate elite athletes who suffer from extreme mental stress. He then began to research events in which those athletes had lost, come second or been injured. Having gathered hundreds of images from the web, television and magazines, Lewer selected twelve that document public scenes of the athletes’ despair, anger, frustration and dejection, rendering these in paint. Tennis player Nick Kyrgios throws his racket to the ground in frustration and rage; disbelief is written on the face of martial arts champion Ronda Rousey as she loses her title; Olympic champion Sally Pearson clutches her broken wrist in agony after crashing over a hurdle; Ian Thorpe is dejected in the pool; and a moment of despair is shared by an AFL football team. Lewer is interested in the person who comes second and what happens next to these athletes.
Years of hard training have gone into the twelve sporting moments Lewer depicts. Sport, like art, requires discipline; the ability to take risks and to keep going despite failure. Embedded in the surfaces of the paintings are the struggles, the risk-taking and the failures of the artist. Layer upon layer has been rubbed back, built up again and changed over the months that the works have taken to complete. Lewer’s Theatre of Sports documents the struggles of elite athletes. It captures the moment of loss, the agony and the disbelief. We watch the athletes struggle very publicly and are left wondering what will happen next. It is, perhaps, not through the triumphs but through the tough moments that we truly find resilience and a deeper understanding of ourselves.”
The Basil Sellers Art Prize exhibition is on display at the Ian Potter Museum of Art until November 6. Be sure to see this work alongside the entries of William Mackinnon, Trent Parke & Narelle Autio. These artists were selected from over 100 entires to make the 15 finalists.
You can view the catalogue here.
Telltale is a writing and exhibition project curated by Justin Hinder and Anna Louise Richardson. The project centres on a narrative conceived by ten artists, written by Justin Hinder and explored in pairs over a series of collaborative workshops and studio sessions, Richard Lewer has been working closely with Eden Menta.
Telltale takes you through the dusty corridors of a once majestic hotel, steeped in the echoes of a mysterious past. A place where lovelorn ghosts float through tumbling children, and where laughter, tears, breakfast and booze blend into a heady cocktail of comic tragedy. Ten artists cross paths as guests in a story that unfolds through fact, fiction and somewhere in between, revealing lost secrets of the scandalous Telltale family before checkout closes for the last time.
This project was produced through Next Wave’s Emerging Curators Program with Arts Project Australia.
Exhibition to be opened by Georgie Meagher, Artistic Director & CEO, Next Wave.
The final works will be on display for Next Wave Festival 2016, launching May 7!
Narelle Autio, Trent Parke, Richard Lewer and William Mackinnon have been announced as finalists in the 2016 Basil Sellers Art Prize!
This prestigious prize is supported by Basil Sellers in order to encourage contemporary artists to develop their practice, to engage with the many themes within sport past and present, and to contribute to critical reflection on all forms of sport and sporting culture in Australia.
Finalists are exhibited at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and the winner will be awarded an acquisitive prize of $100,000 in July 2016.
Congratulations to Narelle, Trent, Richard and William!
Congratulations to Richard Lewer, winner of the 2015 Albany Art Prize! This prestigious national painting prize is an acquisitive prize for $25,000, including a studio residency. The winning work, Untitled from the Mostly Sunny series, was presented by Hugo Michell Gallery during Melbourne Art Fair 2014.
Lewer’s statement about the piece:
Last year the Western Australian government implemented a shark culling program off the swimming beaches of Perth and the South West coastline following the deaths of 7 people. Being a surfer, I was spooked by the fatal attacks, but like many locals, was also concerned about the efficacy of the government’s fear-driven policy and the brutality of the baited drum lines used to capture the sharks.
My work explores extremes and conflict; the shark culling program attracted local, national and international attention, and public demonstrations were held around the country; as a social realist I joined the 6000-strong protest at Cottesloe Beach to document the fervent debate in my local community.
The work will be exhibited alongside the other finalists in the regional city of Albany from September 4 – October 11 2015.
See Albany Art Prize website for more details.
Image: Richard Lewer, Untitled, 2014, from Mostly Sunny, oil on epoxy-coated steel, 100 x 100 cm.
"I just think [art and sport are] so intertwined and close, and I always have. When I was at art school, I was a bit embarrassed by the idea that I had my tennis racquet underneath the table, but the connection for me has always been so strong. When I started boxing, I was training at five in the morning and five at night alongside professional boxers, and that’s when I saw that what they were doing in terms of skill and training was exactly what I’d be doing in the studio. And that’s where that connection became really clear to me."
An extract from Richard Lewer: You Wouldn't Make This Stuff Up an interview with Richard Lewer by Rebecca Gallo in VAULT Magazine
Showing: 21-25 of 25