“Deep Sky Dark Bright Black &” by Tony Lewis
Progetto di Piero Lissoni, a cura di Flash Art
Art Basel Miami Beach
1 – 3 dicembre 2022
Sanlorenzo lands in Miami Beach for the last appointment of the year with the world’s leading modern and contemporary art fair. From 1 to 3 December 2022, in the Collectors Lounge of Art Basel Miami Beach, Sanlorenzo presents the work Deep Sky Dark Bright Black &, commissioned from the American artist Tony Lewis.
The work is produced by Sanlorenzo Arts, designed by Piero Lissoni and curated by Flash Art with the kind collaboration of the MASSIMODECARLO gallery.
Part of the Sanlorenzo Arts platform, an active and interactive reality of projects focusing on urgent issues in today’s world, Deep Sky Dark Bright Black & represents the artist’s investigation of drawing as a means of communication. For Sanlorenzo, Tony Lewis has conceived three new works at the intersection between semiotics, abstraction, and drawing. These works represent the artist’s investigation of drawing as a means of communication. Lewis uses graphite pencil and paper as privileged mediums to trace and generate linguistic narratives reflecting on gestural expression.
Deep Sky Dark Bright Black & is an unpublished work consisting of three separate pieces in graphite and putty on paper, a literal and conceptual foundation in the artist’s work. Tony Lewis rubs, wrinkles, and disperses the graphite on the surfaces, allowing the powder to accumulate into an array of textures and patterns. He uses a dynamic shorthand gesture to mix chosen text fragments and words into a drawing, impressing mysterious codes and textured maps on the paper. These drawings are a journey through the roots of drawing involving shape, line, color, and language. The gestural lines appear as abstract marks, while each word delineates a statement about race, power, and communication, often referencing historical facts or situations.
Lewis creates a narrative that shifts constantly between historical and autobiographical. In fact, he often starts from popular cultural texts from which he extracts fragments and recontextualises them, allowing new meanings to emerge. In dismantling language and undermining its authority, Lewis exposes the inequities and inadequacy of existing linguistic and power structures.
Sanlorenzo’s continuous research/quest, in which the sophisticated synthesis of design, technology and engineering is intertwined with art and contemporaneity, has led the shipyard to progressively approach new creative languages, culminating in the creation of a true platform of artistic projects.
Sanlorenzo Arts consolidates itself more and more as a stable instrument of investigation able to offer new perspectives on the most important issues of today addressing them through the eyes, poetry and wonder of the arts by engaging in a long conversation with artists, designers and thinkers.
Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles; he lives and works in Chicago. Lewis’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2022); MASSIMODECARLO, London (2021); MASSIMODECARLO, Milan (2020); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2017); Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2015). He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. His work is held in notable permanent collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Drawing Institute at The Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, among others.
Tony Lewis was the recipient of the 2017-18 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Award Artist-in-Residence at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Recent group exhibitions include: ICA at the Maine Collage of art and design, Portland, USA (2022); Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Korea (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2022); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2022), Institute of Contempo-rary Art, Philadelphia, USA (2017); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2016); Home Museum, Manchester, UK (2016).
Flash Art is an international magazine and publishing house dedicated to contemporary art, founded in 1967. In its 55-year history, the magazine has recorded the evolution of the establishment, the critique of art history, geopolitical changes, artistic movements and visual culture. Flash art is an active seismograph of contemporaneity directed and published by Gea Politi and Cristiano Seganfreddo.
Sanlorenzo
For over 60 years the Sanlorenzo shipyards have been producing high quality motoryachts, the result of a combination of craftsmanship, design and advanced technologies, made-to-measure according to the owner’s specific requests.
Founded in 1958 by Gianfranco Cecchi and Giuliano Pecchia with the opening of the first shipyard near Florence, Sanlorenzo was taken over in 1972 by Giovanni Jannetti who launched the first fibre-glass hull boat in 1985 and moved the headquarters to Ameglia (SP). In 2005, Massimo Perotti – with a wealth of experience gained in over twenty years of activity in the sector – took the baton.
Under the direction of Mr. Massimo Perotti, Chairman of Sanlorenzo, the shipyard has gone through a period of extraordinary growth, bringing consolidated net revenues from new yachts to a level of 40 million euros in 2004 to 585,9 million euros in 2021.
As one of the main producers worldwide of yachts and superyachts, Sanlorenzo has today four production plants: La Spezia, dedicated to the production of Superyachts, Ameglia for the production of medium and large size yachts, Viareggio, for the production of fibreglass yachts over 100 feet and Massa, the centre for the research and development of new models.
With the acquisition, Sanlorenzo received a significant impetus for innovation and over the years has successfully implemented numerous completely unprecedented concepts that have profoundly changed the yachting world. A major milestone in this journey was its opening to the world of design through the collaboration with renown designers such as Rodolfo Dordoni, Citterio Viel, Piero Lissoni (Sanlorenzo’s Art Director since 2018), Patricia Urquiola, John Pawson and Christian Liaigre.
This unique and innovative approach has also led the company to link itself to the world of art through collaboration with major galleries and cultural institutions: starting with Art Basel, the most important modern and contemporary art fair on the international scene, of which it is a global partner for the annual events in Hong Kong, Basel and Miami Beach. In 2020, Sanlorenzo also became Institutional Patron of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (the most important museum in Italy for 20th century European and American art).
In 2022 Sanlorenzo decided to support the Italian art system by participating as main sponsor of the Italian Pavilion at the 59. International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, a unique opportunity as well as an extraordinary achievement for the shipyard, the first in the world to actively engage in promoting and disseminate contemporary art.
Art Basel
Founded in 1970 by Basel-based gallery owners, Art Basel now hosts the world’s leading art exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, with venues in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Defined by the host city and region, each exhibition is unique; uniqueness that is reflected in the participating galleries, the works presented and the content of the parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition. Art Basel’s commitment has extended beyond art fairs through new digital platforms and a number of new initiatives such as Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, Intersections: The Art Basel Podcast and BMW Art Journey. The Global Media Partner of Art Basel is The Financial Times. For more information, please visit artbasel.com
