Notes

About the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden

Over a decade in the making, the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden is a place of expansive vistas, scents, the sounds of nature, with tranquil groves, hidden paths, and lush indigenous vegetation.

The project began serendipitously when Lewis hired an excavator on a whim and began shaping the contours of what would become the seven-hectare sculpture garden.

Today, the artist continues to explore themes integral to his work in this serene landscape on the slopes of the Stellenbosch Mountain looking out over vineyards towards the ocean.

Here, the notion of the untamed wilderness within the human psyche is expressed both in the sculptures and their positioning in the landscape. With over 60 sculptures in the garden, Lewis's full artistic development thus far can be explored: the human form, shamanic figures, monumental abstracted fragments, and his iconic great cats.

Four kilometres of paths lead visitors on a journey through different 'rooms', from the cultivated to the wild. Each area has been intuitively developed by the artist in response to its surroundings, from the meditative poplar grove to the jasmine-encircled fire pit.

Focused on indigenous species, particularly fynbos, the garden has been planted to give year-round colour.

Unearth the wilderness within.

About the Artist

Dylan Lewis was born in 1964 and raised in an artistic family in South Africa. Widely recognised as one of the world's foremost sculptors of the animal form, the artist initially focused on the big cats as symbols of wilderness, then moved into the human figure to explore the forgotten inner wild spaces of the human psyche and the impact of this amnesia on the planet's remaining wilderness areas. His international career spans three decades and includes exhibitions in Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Houston, San Francisco, as well as numerous one-man exhibitions in London, where he is among the few living artists to have held solo auctions.

Provenance

Donated by Dylan Lewis.