David Lewis. Photo: Axel Dupeux
David Lewis Joins the Gallery as Senior Director
We are pleased to announce that David Lewis has joined the gallery as a Senior Director in New York City. Lewis comes to Hauser & Wirth after having run his own eponymous gallery for over a decade, with a first location on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side and a subsequent space on Walker Street in Tribeca. David Lewis Gallery attracted critical praise for its rigorous program focused equally on solo presentations showcasing emerging artists and incisive theory-driven group exhibitions, and for revising the canon via thoughtful attention to under-recognized older artists and historical figures. Prominent among those Lewis has championed are pioneering feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson (1933 – 2021) and celebrated Alabama-based expressionist painter and sculptor Thornton Dial (1928 – 2016).
Lewis is widely admired for his scholarly and sensitive approach to modern and contemporary cultural narratives, and his fresh interpretations of them. For example, with the exhibition ‘Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg,’ Lewis was first to show Dial, an autodidact and product of the Jim Crow South, in context with famous art titans, proposing the trio as true peers. A specialist in the oeuvre of Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953), Lewis presented ‘Everyone Loves Picabia’ in 2023. Effectively recapping the conversations that had informed his gallery’s ethos and programming over the years, this show promulgated the value of seeking and sharing new connections between emerging and historical art.
Marc Payot remarked, ‘Having admired David Lewis for a very long time, we’re thrilled he is joining our senior team in New York City. Since the end of the pandemic, David and I have spent many hours together, discussing art as well as the art world itself, discovering so much common ground and thinking out loud about dream projects. He shares Hauser & Wirth’s values, our commitment to original art historical scholarship and our love of living artists as generative forces essential to the wellbeing of the wider culture. I am excited to welcome him to Hauser & Wirth.’
Before opening the gallery in 2013, David Lewis lived and worked in Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, on the career of Francis Picabia, titled ‘Francis Picabia and the Problem of Nihilism.’ While in Europe, he contributed regularly to prominent international art magazines such as Artforum and Frieze, and published extensively, including essays on Philip Guston, Henri Matisse and Sturtevant, among many others.
