When I was a little girl, I could escape from my surrounds and disappear into an image, be absorbed by a pattern of my own making. All I needed was a surface to focus on: a textured floor, grass anything with a hint of a pattern. After deep concentration an image would emerge through my own magic eye. Secrets like this opened up the imagined space that kept me safe it became the access on which I managed my whole world.
(Anna Liber Lewis, 2023)
Dazzle Camouflage a solo exhibition of new paintings by contemporary artist Anna Liber Lewis from 6th – 30th September 2023 curated by Hannah Payne at Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne.
These new paintings by Liber Lewis are made through a process of building and erasing, using the language of print and drawing, working across multiple canvases simultaneously, responding and reacting to each other in a generative process.
‘Dazzle camouflage’ or ‘dazzle painting’, an idea introduced by marine artist Norman Wilkinson during the First World War, was created not to conceal but to throw the enemy off course. This form of camouflage was used to help protect ships by employing techniques that resembled those of avant-garde British painters such as Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg, consisting of complex brightly coloured zig-zag lines and geometric shapes.
Using the power dynamic created by colour, line and shape, Anna Liber Lewis is interested in how the retina of the human eye collects imagery, as the brain completes scattered clues into coherent forms.
Liber Lewis’ paintings are organised around a self-reinforcing visual system, whereby a set of formal parameters informs how the image is constructed.
When I was a little girl, I could escape from my surrounds and disappear into an image, be absorbed by a pattern of my own making. All I needed was a surface to focus on: a textured floor, grass anything with a hint of a pattern. After deep concentration an image would emerge through my own magic eye. Secrets like this opened up the imagined space that kept me safe it became the access on which I managed my whole world.
(Anna Liber Lewis, 2023)
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 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. (Ansel Krut, 2023. Excerpt from exhibition text: ‘Cryptography).
