Margo Lewers - No Limits

20/11/2023

The short film of Margo Lewers - No Limits will be screening at Sydney Women’s International film Festival.

Directed by Tor Larsen, this film is about the life and work of pioneering modernist artist Margo Lewers.

We’d love you to join us for the screening on Monday November 27th at Rydges Sydney Central The Reservoir Cinema from 6:30pm-8:30pm.

The life and work of pioneering modernist artist Margo Lewers. Screening Monday November 27th at Rydges Sydney Central The Reservoir Cinema from 6:30pm-8:30pm.

09/05/2023

Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings finishes its run at Penrith Regional Gallery this Sunday 14 May. See this wonderful and free exhibition before it closes.

https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/margo-lewers-a-house-full-of-paintings/

A House Full of Paintings is an exhibition of art and life by the late modernist artist Margo Lewers. Margo was born in 1908 in Mosman, Sydney. In the late 1920s, Margo attended Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo’s evening art classes where she met her future husband, Gerald Lewers. Travelling to Europe with Gerald, Margo studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London in the mid-1930s. In Sydney, between 1940 and 1945, she completed evening classes with renowned Hungarian painter, Desiderius Orban.

Margo worked in a variety of mediums including painting, textiles, sculpture and mosaic, winning her recognition as a leading Postwar Abstract Expressionist. Her early compositions explored colour and formal geometric abstraction; by the early 1960s, her work had become more fluid and expressionistic. She showed extensively in Australia and in several international travelling exhibitions, received numerous public commissions, including the mosaic wall for the Canberra-Rex Hotel in 1957, and the Aubusson tapestry for the Reserve Bank of Australia’s boardroom made completed in 1968. Margo won numerous prizes and awards across her career.

Image: Broken Circles, Margo Lewers, c. 1968 synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 45.3 x 68.6 cm, Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest.

04/05/2023

A House Full of Paintings is a survey exhibition of works celebrating the power and range of 20th Century Modernist artist, Margo Lewers. The exhibition reflects on a time in the late 1960s when Margo lived alone here in her former home, now the Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest. Her husband, the sculptor Gerald Lewers had since passed, and her daughters Darani and Tanya were pursuing their own careers in Sydney.

As Margo prepared for the first solo exhibition of her work to be held at home in the recently converted Ancher House Gallery, she set the scene, proclaiming in an interview that ‘it’s a house without people, its only inhabitants are paintings’. Paintings were hung in the kitchen and prints covered the walls in the bathroom. The experience of painting was expanded beyond the frame into the artist’s entire domestic environment, in the form of floor mosaics, interior design, architecture, and Margo’s beloved garden that she designed and maintained well into her later years.

Margo’s lifelong dedication to Abstraction was a way to make visible the intangible. It was a personal expression as much as a refusal of representational form. Emotional response became a primary motivator for artistic creation, not only in the studio, but for Margo it reflected an ideology for a new way of living.

Join Curator, Nina Stromqvist on Saturday 6 May, for an insightful tour of the exhibition Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings, exploring the power and range of 20th Century Modernist artist, Margo Lewers.

Join Curator, Nina Stromqvist for an insightful tour of the exhibition Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings, exploring the power and range of 20th Century Modernist artist, Margo Lewers.

02/05/2023

Between 1942 and 1978, Margo, with some initial help from her husband Gerald (Gerry) created a seasonally changing environment with a variety of organically arranged spaces: sunken and raised rock gardens, ponds, trees, shrubs, creepers, flowering plants, and river boulders. These elements, chosen for their colours, textural interest, and form, complemented Margo’s painted wall mural, her floor, wall, and table mosaics, and Gerald’s sculptures and fountains. This was in keeping with the Modernist idea that the arts are an intrinsic part of our total environment.

Join us on Saturday 6 May at Penrith Regional Gallery as horticulturalist, landscape designer, heritage consultant, and one of the authors of Margo Lewer's: No Limits, Gina Plate will lead a walking tour through Margo Lewers’ garden. As Margo's niece (the daughter of Margo’s brother, artist Carl Plate) Gina will share unique insights inspired by her many childhood visits to the beautiful garden at Emu Plains.

https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/garden-tour-with-gina-plate/

30/04/2023

Lovely write-up in the November issue of the Art Gallery of NSW Members LOOK Magazine. You can pick up a copy of Margo Lewers: No Limits at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Shop.

https://shop.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/margo-lewers-no-limits/

28/04/2023

Margo Lewers offers a rich opportunity to explore the way one woman used interior design both professionally and privately as a form of creative expression. Her career spans two phases: the professional designer of the 1930s and 40s and the private homes she created as an artist in the 1950s and 60s. Both endeavours reveal that for Margo, the interior was a place of experimentation, reuse, fluidity, and invention.

26/04/2023

Join us on Saturday 6 May, as horticulturalist, landscape designer, heritage consultant, and one of the authors of Margo Lewer's: No Limits, Gina Plate will lead a walking tour through Margo Lewers’ garden. As Margo's niece (the daughter of Margo’s brother, artist Carl Plate) Gina will share unique insights inspired by her many childhood visits to the garden at Emu Plains.

Horticulturalist, landscape designer, and heritage consultant Gina Plate will lead a walking tour through Margo Lewers’ garden. As the daughter of Margo’s brother, artist Carl Plate, Gina will share unique insights inspired by her many childhood visits to the garden at Emu Plains.

24/04/2023

The exhibition Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings is in full swing at Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest. Get along to see the collection of Margo’s incredible and varied work. Details can be found on the gallery website here: https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/margo-lewers-a-house-full-of-paintings/

21/03/2023

Working with renowned Australian architect, Sydney Ancher, Margo and Gerald worked to further adapt the farmhouse at Emu Plains into a liveable yet inspiring architectonic landscape. Here is Sydney Ancher's working drawing, dated February 1961. This drawing was submitted to Penrith Council and approved in June 1961. Drawing courtesy of Peter Griva.

17/03/2023

In 1970 Margo was asked to submit a proposal for a wall relief in the foyer of News Limited’s new building on Holt Street, Surry Hills. She had hoped to use glass as the medium, but this was soon rejected as impractical, lacking flexibility and too heavy. Opting instead for Plexiglass. Margo began tentatively, creating small three-dimensional pieces with off-cuts and coloured cellophane paper to explore variations of colour translucency and investigate the medium’s potential to embrace light and project shadows. She was interested also in layering different colours to maximise a sense of depth. Although her approach was intuitive and spontaneous, it is likely she used line drawings and colour notes to guide the ultimate image. This process demonstrates Margo’s determination to explore and control another medium; to master a new visual language.

Image: 'Orange on Grey' c. 1971 coloured plexiglass, Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest. See this and other works by Margo Lewers at Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest in the exhibit Margo Lewers: A House Full of Painting which launches alongside the book Margo Lewers: No Limits which launches tomorrow, Saturday 18 March at 1 pm. For more info https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/margo-lewers-a-house-full-of-paintings/

16/03/2023

As a ‘pioneering Sydney abstract artist’ of the 1950s, Margo Lewers did ‘much to promote modernist ideas, particularly ideas of abstract expressionism' and, according to gallery director Alan Sisley, she was still appealing to young people in the new millennium.

Referring to work in her National Trust Retrospective Exhibition that travelled to New South Wales regional galleries throughout 2002 and 2003, Sisley particularly focused on her fabric hangings, describing them as ‘glorious bright swathes of floating colour and geometric form’ creating a ‘quite remarkable illusion of depth into space, achieved primarily through colour conjunctions’.

You can see more of Margo's work in the exhibit Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings and the book Margo Lewers: No Limits, both launching this Saturday 18 March at 1 pm at Penrith Regional Art Gallery and The Lewers Bequest.

More info: https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/margo-lewers-a-house-full-of-paintings/

This chapter of the book, Margo Lewers No Limits, is written by Margo's daughters, artists Darani Lewers and Tanya Crothers.

Image. Margo Lewers 'Wreckage'. 1956 oil on hardboard. Art Gallery of NSW.

15/03/2023

'Quarry Face' by Margo Lewers 1956, oil on composition board, 50.8 x 44.0 cm. See this and other works by Margo at in the new exhibit Margo Lewers: A House Full of Paintings which launches on Saturday 18 March along with the book Margo Lewers: No Limits.

Info to RSVP to the launch: https://tinyurl.com/2fzmx5v4