Artist Database

Dylan Lewis was born in Johannesburg in 1964. He began as a painter but built his artistic career on the success of his animal sculptures. While he has sculpted smaller cats, his main focus has been on large predators: lions, cheetahs, and leopards. These cats embody a metaphorical quality for Lewis, and he has rendered them performing many different activities of their daily lives, such as hunting, playing, stretching, and resting. After ten years working in this genre, he shifted his focus to the naked human form to investigate the wildness of the human psyche. This exploration of nudity was also a reaction against the religious beliefs and conservatism of his upbringing, wherein this subject was prohibited. His early female figures, falling under the heading ‘forbidden forms,’ are erotic, emotive, and ambiguous. In 2017, he opened the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden in Stellenbosch. The indigenous garden, particularly concentrated on fynbos, is a marriage of his love for the outdoors and sculpture – he has carefully shaped the land, curated the plants, and placed more than 60 of his sculptures along the 4 km of winding paths. Lewis is popular with local and international collectors and has held numerous exhibitions worldwide, including in France, Australia, Canada, the USA, and the UK.