Born October 26
Chemainus, BC 1935
Chemainus, BC 1935
Vancouver, BC 1954–1958
c. 1958
Vancouver, BC 1958–1959
Haney, BC 1959–1961
St. Ives, Cornwall 1961–1964
1964–1965
Vancouver, BC 1964–1967
Glenn Lewis is the latest to show his wares and his extensive display affirms an emphatically superior craftsmanship in a context emphasizing a down-to-earth practicality and masculine idiom.
Vancouver, BC 1965
Vancouver, BC 1965
Ottawa, ON 1966
1966
Toronto, ON 1967
1967
Montreal, QC 1967
Vancouver, BC 1967
Vancouver, BC 1967
Toronto, ON 1967
Toronto, ON 1967
Tonight in Toronto four excited young Vancouver artists will be presented with awards by Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh for their entries in Perspective ’67.
Vancouver, BC 1967
Installed at the Douglas Gallery in 1968 1967
Installed at the Douglas Gallery in 1968 1967
1967
Into this sparkling ambiance Glenn Lewis has introduced his small white porcelain sculptures. […] They subvert in a half-playful, half-mocking way the practical use of cups, plates and saucers, crumpling and ripping them as though they were paper.
Ottawa, ON 1967
Vancouver, BC 1967
1967-1968
1968
Winnipeg, MB 1968
Vancouver, BC 1968
Vancouver, BC 1968
Vancouver, BC 1968
Winnipeg, MB 1968
Vancouver, BC 1968
Seattle, WA 1968
With these new materials we enter into a looking glass world where nothing is as it seems. And any well polished surface makes the viewer if only fleetingly a physical part of the sculpture.
Vancouver, BC 1968
1968
1968
1968
1968
They are more than three dimensional shapes and the artists have set up in space objects and podiums with no palpable boundaries. The “real” and the “illusory” march hand in hand.
Vancouver, BC 1968
1968
c. 1968
Lewis and his ex-student Gathie Falk are exploring a combination of media that is highly unusual in the whole field of art and which puts the viewer on edge primarily because of the contrast between slickly finished machine made ‘packaging’ and personally formed ceramic objects. They are creating a “school of local sculpture.”
Vancouver, BC 1968
Toronto, ON 1968
Performance at Vancouver Art Gallery 1968
Victoria, BC 1968
Vancouver, BC 1968
[The Douglas Gallery show] marks his breakthrough as an environmentalist – or rather as the dual creator of miniatures and mind-blowing vistas of silvery space.
Vancouver, BC 1968
In 1967 he began to use plastic boxes as reliquaries and environments for his porcelain sculpture; their factory-made anonymity a startling contrast to their contents.
Toronto, ON 1968
1968-1969
1969
Vancouver, BC 1969
Vancouver, BC 1969
Victoria, BC 1969
Vancouver, BC 1969
Lewis’ exhibit never attains the status of an art object, and it implies only the most vague and general position in a process of making objects. A self-conscious tour-de-force, it establishes the aura of the artist, the atmosphere of his presence, with the absolute minimum of proof.
Vancouver, BC 1969
1969
1969
Performed at the Festival for Contemporary Arts 1969
c. 1969
Roberts Creek, BC 1969
Newport, CA, Santa Barbara, CA 1969
1969
“The whole idea of significance, the heroic idea of art, is a bummer. Everything is significant, every rock and twig. So much so that it’s hard to know what’s what.”
Vancouver, BC 1969
Why did he choose it? “I’ve always been attracted to graph paper. I have a whole collection of it with all different lines. It’s an indispensable kind of tool in our very systematic society.”
Vancouver, BC 1969
1969
1969
The July 11 performance […] is free to the public, and is termed by the National Film Board “an eye and mind cleaning process toward the apprehension of a new reality.”
Vancouver, BC 1969
While Lewis is focusing attention on the ceramic objects themselves and the dichotomies between superb craftsmanship and impolite psychic suggestions, he is also structuring and altering the entire environment within the boxes and within the context of the room.
Newport, CA 1969
New York, NY 1970
Vancouver, BC – Alfred, NY 1970
Vancouver, BC 1970
c. 1970
c. 1970
Lewis calls it Artifact. The making of art is as important as the product. This idea in itself is a move away from the one of a precious object in a specific area, painting or sculpture or architecture.
Vancouver, BC 1970
1970
1970
1970
1970
c. 1970
c. 1970
1970
1970
1970
A show cow, winner of the Quebec Agricultural Fair gold medal in 1969, shown in the unexpected context of an art gallery, staring at a painting of a 19th century predecessor in a lavish gold frame – this exhibit has proved one of the most controversial in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Survey ’70, subtitled Realisms.
Vancouver, BC 1970
Performance at University of Calgary 1970
It could be that some taxpayers’ money may be involved in this episode, and 50 half-hours of wasted time brings to mind there are better things to do on a lovely sunny day in April in Vancouver.
Vancouver, BC 1970
Vancouver, BC 1970
Oberlin, OH 1970
Montreal, QC, Toronto, ON 1970
1970
[…] The commissioner called in his entire office staff to view the mural. Three of these highly sophisticated and artistically educated people BLUSHED when they saw the work. ‘Oh, oh,’ said the commissioner and the mural was not hung.
Vancouver, BC 1970
Vancouver, BC 1970
His Closets shows [sic] what he learned: unerring placement of elements; tenderness for what is weathered, damaged even; and a refinement in which that faint preciosity which for me has sometimes marred his work has been burned away.
Vancouver, BC 1970
The film is slowed down to 16 frames per second silent speed, so that he penetrates the forest gently, reverently. Sometimes he is like a swimmer underwater, disappearing in pools of greenery or moving half-hidden behind a dappled screen of ferns.
Vancouver, BC 1970
[The closets are] about six months old. They’re not my current work. In some ways they’re incidental to it. They’re my artistic accumulations, a way of documenting what I’ve done, like a collage in a sense. The inside part – the object – is the end-product of all the boxes I had been doing before.
Vancouver, BC 1970
1970
Ottawa, ON 1970
1970
c. 1970-1971
Alfred, NY 1970–1971
Vancouver, BC 1970–1973
Vancouver, BC 1971
c. 1971
1971
1971
c. 1971
Tables laden with apples and bananas invite you to help yourself, while Glenn Lewis in a comic knitted Mickey Mouse mask and a big white apron officiates at a propane gas stove, filling the gallery with the most tantalizing odor as he makes doughnuts. (He opened his last show at the Ace Gallery with a Sunday brunch).
Vancouver, BC 1971
Vancouver, BC 1971–1972
Vancouver, BC 1971–1974
Halifax, NS, Toronto, ON, New York, NY 1972
New York, NY 1972
c. 1972
c. 1972
1972
1972
Performance at Crystal Pool, Vancouver 1972
1972
Vancouver, BC 1972
Vancouver, BC 1973
Vancouver, BC 1973
Burnaby, BC 1973
Paris 1973
Vancouver, BC 1973–1976
Vancouver, BC 1974
Vancouver, BC 1974
Burnaby, BC 1974
Köln 1974
Seattle, WA 1974
London 1974
1974
1974
1974
Los Angeles, CA 1974
I think future explorers—green or not—will learn as much, perhaps more, from them about this strange, benighted and beautiful twentieth century as all the time capsules buried in cornerstones of federal buildings across Canada.
Toronto, ON 1974
The exhibition at the University of B.C. Fine Arts Gallery […] demonstrates the degree to which the dematerialization of the art object has taken place on the West Coast.
Vancouver, BC 1974
1974
Burnaby, BC 1974
The astounding thing about Lewis’ mural […] is that it does not, as one might fear, present a hodge-podge of trivia. Physically it is colorful and arresting, while intellectually it provides food for endless speculation. That bale of hay, that crinkled screenprint, those plastic bananas…
Vancouver, BC 1974
Departing from the agreed “ground zero” Gilbert, Lewis, Taki Bluesinger, and de Courcy Spent about 10 hours documenting their respective routes. The resulting mural is presented like a map […]
Vancouver, BC 1974
National Research Library, Ottawa 1974
Though the contributions, on average, scarcely reach a higher level of consciousness than most art of the ephemeral, the total amounts to somewhat more than the sum of the parts.
Toronto, ON 1974
Vancouver, BC 1974–1976
Vancouver, BC 1975
Toronto, ON 1975
Toronto, ON 1975
Montreal, QC 1975
Vancouver, BC 1975
Toronto, ON 1975
1975
Kansas City, MO 1975
Vancouver, BC 1976
Vancouver, BC 1976
Kingston, ON 1976
Winnipeg, MB 1976
Tempe, AZ 1976
Sacramento, CA 1976
Winnipeg, MB 1976
1980
Presentation House Gallery 2010
Presentation House Gallery 2010
2010
Presentation House Gallery 2010
2011