Tony Lewis: Anthology 2014-2016

Inventive text collages made from Calvin and Hobbes comics

Los Angeles–based Tony Lewis (born 1986) is part of an exciting generation of artists working to collapse the boundaries between genres and forms. He has quickly established himself in the art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction. His monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging and erasing text, he shifts the way we read to open up new and unexpected meanings.
To create Anthology 2014–2016, Lewis deconstructed hundreds of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, reordered them and shaped them into poems through a process of erasing, editing and rearranging dialogue. Each poem is assembled as a collage of individual drawings that explores the collaborative nature of creativity and authorship, leaving meaning open to a range of interpretations.