DYLAN LEWIS | NEW WORKS

Everard Read Cape Town

3 Portswood Rd, V&A Waterfront

 

 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
                          T. S. Eliot – extract from Little Gidding

 

 
Everard Read Cape Town is delighted to present a collection of new bronzes by Dylan Lewis. In these new works, Lewis returns to the charged territory where the animal form becomes a contemplative vessel for something older than language, a threshold between worlds. His animals are not merely observed – they are invoked. Through surface, texture and form, Lewis reveals the paradox of wild grace: power held in restraint, lithe explosiveness held in silence.

What emerges is less a depiction of species than a meditation on being. The leopard’s contained intensity, the cheetah’s fluid alertness, the buffalo’s obstinate aloofness & the prey’s quick-wittedness become mirrors for our own instinct, vulnerability, and the perpetual negotiation between control and surrender. These works invite us to recognize, in their quiet authority, a shared, untamed pulse. Lewis urges us to encounter not only the essence of these elusive cats but the deeper rhythms that bind all living things: attention, tension, release. The works linger like a held breath, reminding us that the wild is not elsewhere; it waits, attentive and enduring, within and all around us.

For over three decades, Lewis has cemented himself as one of the great sculptors of our time, and here again he presents a masterclass in manifesting these beautiful creatures, coiled with stillness and tense with intent. At once effortless and rhapsodic, with ferocity and vigour in every mark.