Anna Liber Lewis is a painter. She was the 2013 recipient of the Genesis Foundation Scholarship to study at the RCA gaining an MFA, 2015. She holds a BA from Central Saint Martins. Winner of both the Griffin Arts Prize and the Young Contemporary Talent Prize supported by the Ingram Collection in 2017. Her first solo show was at Elephant West, commissioned by Elephant Magazine: a call and response between music and painting. The project lives on via the Four Tet EP: Anna Painting.
She has shown widely in the UK and Europe. Her work is held in many private collections. She lives and works in London.
Anna Liber Lewis’ paintings are organised around a self-reinforcing visual system, whereby a set of formal parameters informs how the image is constructed. The paintings are made through a process of building and erasing, using the language of print and drawing. She works across many canvases, responding and reacting to the other in a generative process, much like how music is processed. “In the studio I lam free to listen to my nervous system, like an anechoic chamber, and move the sense datum which remains trapped in my body.”
These new works point to the presence of the body. Colors are no longer separated by distinct lines; shapes move, change and morph. They are a synthesis of gently responding and violently reacting to each other. “I approach the canvas very physically, applying paint in ways that extend and challenge my body: moving the canvas from the wall to the floor, and pressing the oil paint into the surface to disrupt the surface with whatever is at hand in the studio - an old t-shirt, plastic wrap or edge of cardboard.”
Dance and music, rhytm and repetition, often drive the work. Her paintings bring the mind and body together via ritualised physical processes that regulate her autonomic nervous system. Over the past 5 years Liber Lewis has been concerned with concepts around how the body holds and releases trauma and Polyvagal Theory. “What’s quietly radical about (these images) is how utterly Liber Lewis has internalised and personalised her own language of painterly abstraction. There’s no strategic positioning here, and no call and response to Abstraction’s origin story. And, powerful as the work is, there is clearly no macho posturing. It gives her great freedom for variety and for play; from the tongue in cheek of hiding her name in the various works, to the encoded dynamic explosion between foreground and background.” Ansel Krut.
Cryptography
Text by Ansel Krut
It is said that speaking while passing a monkey puzzle tree will bring bad luck or cause you to grow a monkey's tail. (Old Fenland belief)
The unlikely beauty of Dazzle Camouflage, the painting from which the show takes its tile, is immediately challenging. Here are two distinct propositions that we must reconcile. First, four tall overlapping rectangles in light blue outline, like doorframes. Then a background, in violets, yellows and their impure mixture, that is inset with white full moons and scattered with rectangular strips where tape has been applied, painted over, and removed. Those strips are a clue, and call for patience, we will come back to them. The background has been transferred from a secondary surface so that it feels less immediate than the blue, as though reported on rather than painted, with a hint of being seen at a remove. It escapes recognition in a tip-of-my-tongue way, I can almost but not quite name it. It has something of a dried river bed about it, something geographic. Then white moon discs kick in as an association: can this be a planetary surface, lunar? So the moon and its surface shown in conjunction? And if not exactly the moon, then certainly a diagram of elsewhere. The blue of the doorframes stands out with such purity against the background. The colour rings out like the Madonna’s cloak in a Bellini, celestial. The overlapping doorframes set up their own chain of puzzle linkages; some of the corners are squared off, others not, their geometric rigidly is more speculative than fixed, one doorframe is incomplete. Now I wonder if it isn’t just the same doorframe shifting, as though between blinks of my eye, each a portal, offering entrance to parallel universes. Phew. I come back to those rectangular strips. I recognise them as stencils, places where tape has been. They are like footprints in sand, evidence of the making of the picture, of the artist having been there. The removed-tape strip on the bottom right is banded with the colours used in the image. It reminds me of those little squares that art conservators leave untouched when restoring a painting, to let you know that what you are seeing in the present is only a version of what you might have seen in the past. Contingent histories.
What’s quietly radical about these images is how utterly Liber Lewis has internalised and personalised her own language of painterly abstraction. Theres no strategic positioning here, and no call and response to Abstraction’s origin story. And, powerful as the work is, there is clearly no macho posturing. It gives her great freedom for variety and for play; from the tongue in cheek of hiding her name in the various versions of the Anna series, to the encoded dynamic explosion between fore-and-background in Hidden in the Zero, or a stroll through the pleasurably inconsistent architecture of Circadian Reset. If there are artistic forbears to these images they might be Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Annie Albers, artists who crossed easily between painting, design and textile, and whose work was too fluid for easy categorisation.
Liber Lewis said recently that her painting “will take care of itself”. So she hands them over to us as complex and engrossing visual conundrums, demanding attention (lest we grow that monkey tail). But they resist categorical fixity and single solutions, remain speculative and allusive. Much of their allure lies in how they deflect our focus, align unlikely correspondences, catch us off guard. So yes, absolutely, dazzle camouflage.