Biography

Simon Lewty was born in 1941, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. He studied at the Mid-Warwickshire and Hornsey Schools of Art (1957-62), and was a lecturer there from 1964-1981. He now lives and works in Leamington Spa. From a quiet fixed point in Middle England, Lewty's work has travelled widely, entering the collections of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Birmingham, Cleveland, Leeds, Preston, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton and Worcester City Art Galleries and to Miami Beach, USA, where he is represented in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry.

Since the 1980's he has had an active programme of exhibitions; with Anne Berthoud (1985; 1987; 1988; 1992), the Serpentine Gallery, London (1985), Mead Gallery, University of Warwick (1992) and Art First (From 1995 onwards). In 2001 he had an important exhibition, Towards Drawing, which toured to eight museums in the UK.

Lewty's is a unique voice in contemporary British art. The titles of his exhibitions – Messages From the Past, Terra Incognita - and of his work - Palimpsest, Approaches to an Ancient Fair, Margins of the Town - begin to tell their own story about his art. Some viewers choose to see it as a powerful meditation on history. Certainly, the artist is interested by time, by its passing and the marks which tell of that passing. "To me", he says, "the idea of a place bearing traces of the presence of its earlier occupants is deeply fascinating and moving, linked as it is to the idea of penetrating, in imagination, their faint thoughts."

The essentially graphic nature of the work involves many layers in which one inscribed paper surface is laid over another, so that text and drawing mingle, disclosing here and there a narrative, or else indecipherable graffiti. The ancient looking, map-like, drawings lead us on a surrealistic journey that explores urban realities as well as intimately known aspects of rural Warwickshire.

The works for Episodes are solely text based. "While Lewty's texts excavate ancient worlds of light and darkness, and show forth the persistence of the disregarded, they also belong to now….The connection to now is all the more powerful for being oblique, perhaps even unintentional, but Lewty's works remind me of how we are immersed by electronic and other media in a flood of disembodied words, messages or signs beamed to us without apparent source or agency. These ghosts in the machines today intrude everywhere upon our lives, bleeping and commanding…..In the face of this contemporary leavening and loss of meaning, the need to inscribe, to give shape to utterance, to dwell with the incomprehensible, is all the more urgent. In this sense Lewty's latest works invert and redeem the disembodiment which threatens us."

Paul Hills, extract from Episodes exhibition catalogue.