COMING SOON
COMING SOON
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LIO MALCA AND ISAAC MALCA PRESENT: SPENCER LEWIS AT
LA NAVE SALINAS
Fundación La Nave Salinas opens the summer season with a solo exhibition of monumental works by Spencer Lewis from June 21, through August 8, 2025.
An exploration of vibrant, tactile abstraction through raw, expressive gestures.
With this presentation, La Nave celebrates its tenth anniversary, continuing its commitment to providing a cultural platform for innovative artists who push the boundaries of materiality, form, and visual language.
THE EXHIBITION
Fundación La Nave Salinas, a leading institution dedicated to showcasing contemporary art, is pleased to announce La noche de día (Night by Day), a solo exhibition of paintings by celebrated American artist Spencer Lewis opening June 21, 2025.
Lewis has created this large body of vibrant paintings specifically for the home of the foundation, a repurposed 1940s salt warehouse overlooking Las Salinas beach in Ibiza.
“From the moment I first saw Spencer Lewis’s paintings, I knew their raw energy belonged inside La Nave,” says Lio Malca, founder of Fundación La Nave Salinas. “On our tenth anniversary, it feels fitting to honor the island with an exhibition that radiates such fearless color and material intensity.”
In this exhibition, Lewis expands on his longstanding engagement with gestural abstraction, blending influences from Abstract Expressionism with his own distinct vocabulary. The chaotic brushstrokes of his early “Cage” paintings, with their X shaped forms and anthropomorphic figures, evolve into complex compositions where each stroke interplays with those that came before. The thick layers of paint, built up over time, create a dynamic tension between harmony and dissonance, encouraging viewers to experience the ongoing evolution of each work.
“La noche de día presents a rare opportunity to experience the intensity of Spencer Lewis’s work in a site-specific context, offering a unique dialogue between the artist’s vibrant color palette, his expressive use of material, and the stunning, immersive architecture of La Nave,” says Isaac Malca, Director of Fundación La Nave Salinas.
THE WORKS
The artist’s heavy brushstrokes and impulsive gestures create densely layered compositions where color and texture build over time, forming a visual narrative that reveals and conceals itself in equal measure.
The resulting works invite viewers to engage deeply with the painting, uncovering new meanings and stories as they explore its surfaces.
Lewis honors his African American heritage through his use of burlap. Recognizing the rich history of textile craftsmanship in Black communities, he acknowledges the struggles and resilience associated with labor during and after slavery, particularly in the exploitative cotton industry.
Using a loom to create his own burlap in the studio, Lewis produces a fabric with a looser structure that feels rougher than conventional canvas. This texture not only offers a more engaging surface to explore, but also serves as a coded language reflecting both practical and economic realities.
Using a loom to create his own burlap in the studio, Lewis produces a fabric with a looser structure that feels rougher than conventional canvas. This texture not only offers a more engaging surface to explore, but also serves as a coded language reflecting both practical and economic realities.
Opening La noche de día
Making of La noche de día
THE ARTIST
“The act of painting is a conversation with the canvas,” says Lewis. “Every mark is a response to what came before, and I’m constantly searching for that balance between control and chaos.”
Spencer Lewis
Spencer Lewis (b. 1979, Hartford, Connecticut) is renowned for his bold, gestural artworks that combine vibrantly saturated colors with thick layers of paint, rough strokes, and energetic, streaked lines. His unconventional choice of surfaces, such as cardboard and jute, allows the raw texture of the material to become integral to the finished work. These surfaces heighten the physical presence of the paint and contribute to the visceral, almost chaotic energy that defines Lewis’s practice.
While rooted in the rawness of gestural abstraction, Lewis’s work also incorporates references to Modernist traditions. As a child, he studied the works of Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning, tracing their compositions and experimenting with the physicality of paint. This early investigation into structure and planes of color continues to influence his approach to space, form, and movement in his current body of work. Lewis’s paintings are not merely records of expressive gestures; they are carefully orchestrated compositions that reflect his ongoing exploration of the possibilities within abstraction.
Lewis’ work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentoville, Arkansas. He is currently represented by Vito Schnabel Gallery and Massimo De Carlo Gallery.