“This body of work comes from a place of risk and continual revision. Painting feels easier now, not because it’s resolved, but because I’m more willing to let go of control. I’m interested in how painting holds the body - how it changes, resists, and carries memory over time. The process depends on being both in control and out of control. It comes from repetition, and from a mental and physical agility: staying limber, warm, and ready for anything.”
Hannah Payne Art presents Spectral Interference a major solo exhibition by London-based painter Anna Liber Lewis at Saatchi Gallery, bringing together a new body of work that represents a rupture to her earlier grid-based works. The new works embrace abstraction as a site of risk, embodiment, and perceptual instability.
Across paintings of varying scale, Liber Lewis leaves behind the grid and their line work. Structure is still present, not as a fixed system, but as a generative structure - that can be disrupted, softened, or pushed to breaking point. The new paintings have evolved through cycles of editing and return: surfaces are worked into, scraped back, reactivated, and at times deliberately destabilised. Old works are revisited and altered, reflecting a willingness to give up control in pursuit of something more alive.
Central to this new body of work is an interest in high-stakes painting - the ongoing tension between abstraction and figuration, structure and the body, control, and risk. Influenced by disparate artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Carroll Dunham, Liber Lewis approaches abstraction as a physical, confronting act, where the mark carries memory, effort, and jeopardy. Gesture operates not as expressive excess but as a record of decision-making, endurance, and doubt.
Spectral Interference at Saatchi Gallery brings together a significant group of new and recent works, including paintings such as Embodied Other, My GRB Afterglow, and Very Rare Picture of Earth II, alongside a number of large-scale canvases shown publicly for the first time. Presented at a pivotal moment in Liber Lewis’ career, this exhibition represents her most ambitious institutional presentation to date, following her recent inclusion in the group exhibition Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London at Saatchi Gallery (2024).
For more information: saatchigallery.com/whats-on
Enquiries: info@hannahpayneart.co.uk
