Sam Lewitt

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Sequence 9: One Work, One Week..., an exhibition wherein, over the course of six weeks, a single artwork is on view for the duration of one or two weeks. This sequencing of objects by various artists articulated over time constitutes a break from the traditional group show in which works are relationally installed in space rather than time.

This ninth iteration of the exhibition began with a suite of drawings from 2008 by Raha Raissnia, and was followed by a stamped painting on ceramic plaster panel by Florian Pumhösl. The third work in the show was a multimedia wall mounted object by Flint Jamison. Sam Lewitt’s haunting glass projection work, presented in darkness, constitutes the fourth installment in the series.

Sam Lewitt’s Lens crystallizes snapshots of a ‘smoke test’ of an unrealized design for a streamlined cruise ship into light shaping surfaces. This unrealized early-twentieth-century design for a cruise ship is the result of an office exercise commissioned by Norman Bel Geddes design associates. The boat was shaped to optimally reduce friction with external environmental conditions. In this presentation it appears through the effluence of its internal combustion. The drift of multiple fires has been simulated in a digital model of its hull using software designed to test fluid dynamics.

Milled shards of a shattered Plexiglas sheet filter the light from a single LED source gathering it into an image through sheer surface variation. Lewitt’s Lens works are physically identical to rippled patterns refracted onto surfaces adjacent to water on a sunny day. The computational reconstruction and control of this phenomenon is being developed as a method of optical watermarking. While the movement of water and light are technically the guiding principle, in optics, this phenomenon is referred to as a “caustic” projection, a word whose original meaning is “to burn.”

Sam Lewitt (b. 1981, Los Angeles) completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2005 after receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. In 2020, Lewitt had a solo exhibition, CURE (the Work), at Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium. In 2017, his work was presented in VIVA Arte Viva, the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Lewitt’s exhibition More Heat Than Light was on view in 2015 at the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and traveled to the Kunsthalle Basel, and, under the title Less Light Warm Words, to the Swiss Institute, New York. Previously, Lewitt co-organized the exhibition and Materials and Money and Crisis at the MUMOK, Vienna, with Richard Birkett, a show in which he was also included, and drunken walks/cliché/corrosion fatigue/ebay at Miguel Abreu Gallery. His work “Fluid Employment” was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions dedicated to Lewitt’s work have been held at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2020, 2018, 2014, 2011, 2008, 2006), Galerie Buchholz, Berlin and Cologne (2017, 2013, 2011, 2008), Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2014), and Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin (2009, 2007). His work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, Bergen Kunsthall, Secession, La Panacée, The Brno House of Arts, the Pulitzer Foundation, Fridericianum, David Roberts Art Foundation, White Columns, SculptureCenter, MoMA PS1, Artists Space, the Swiss Institute, David Zwirner, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, and Andrew Roth Gallery.

His work is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mumok, Vienna, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the Pinault Collection, Fondazione Memmo, Rome, and the Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, among others. Lewitt was the recipient of the 2018 BMW Open Work commission at the Frieze Art Fair in London, a 2018 Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and was also the 2018 Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell University. Fluid Employment, a monograph dedicated to Lewitt’s eponymous work, was published in 2013. In 2014, his artist book Template, was published by Three Star Books. Catalogues of his exhibitions Cure (the Work), More Heat Than Light and Stranded Assets were printed in 2022, 2016 and 2017, respectively.