Solo exhibition

Odds & Sods

Spencer LewisJosh Lilley, LondonOctober 13 – November 18, 2022

Paintings on unprimed jute at Josh Lilley, each named after a track on Nirvana’s Incesticide — the album of B-sides and outtakes. Text by Ben Street.

Incesticide is no-one’s favourite Nirvana album. Released a year after the triumphant success of Nevermind, it’s a kind of stopgap compilation of B-sides and outtakes, a means of stemming the flow of bootleg recordings. In his essay “Oh, the Guilt”, Chuck Klosterman describes it as “guilt rock”: music made by a band that saw itself as small becoming unexpectedly, and embarrassingly, huge. Each painting in Spencer Lewis’ new body of work is named after a different track on that album, and by doing so draws a line between its noisy neuroses and his own ambivalent channelling of painting’s wildest edges. The language of Lewis’ work – muscular gestural abstraction, let’s say – comes, like Nirvana’s own music, already freighted with performance anxiety. What kind of possibilities remain for that sort of densely wrought, hard-won expressionism? Lewis’ paintings don’t answer that question. They ask it.

From the text by Ben Street, September 2022, for Josh Lilley. Read the full press release

Installation views

Lewis marshals the trappings of modernist authenticity – big, splattering paint strokes; wilful disregard for finish, in both senses of the word; wild, unruly colour – not to subvert them, as artists did in the 60s, but to prod them for signs of life.
Ben Street, Odds & Sods, Josh Lilley, 2022