Being Richard Lewer

According to New Zealand-born and Melbourne-based artist Richard Lewer, ‘I drew Noah’s Ark when I was six years old and the act of drawing felt really good. I knew I wanted to make art.’¹Richard Lewer, ‘Members Talk: Richard Lewer in Conversation with Amita Kirpalani’, National Gallery of Victoria, 18 July 2026. All quotes in this essay are from this conversation unless otherwise cited. Lewer has always had a deep familiarity with the stories and icons of Western religion. Raised Catholic in New Zealand, he describes a childhood surrounded by the religion’s rich visual and narrative language as expressed through rituals, rites and stories – often ‘dramatic, brutal, visual stories’. He explains:

‘I was always questioning my own faith but also how to navigate myself at a religious school or at church, at prayers, at all of these things. But the visual references in the church or in confession, looking at the stations of the cross or the rosary beads and things like that, became my visual feeding ground’ ²Richard Lewer, interview by Elisha Buttler, 10 Feb. 2023.

Adam and Eve, 2022 (purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2024), is a series of twelve paintings showing the creation story of Adam and Eve as described in Christian, Jewish, Islamic and other faith systems. Each painting shares a different part of the story via heavily saturated yet ethereal compositions that bleed colour and form.

Every painting has the appearance of something from a dream or a memory that’s difficult to recall. Lewer says he intended the series to embody a distinctly ‘otherworldly’ energy, as though each work, or each scene, had been ‘dug up four hundred years’ after its creation.

In Eve takes the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and shares the fruit with Adam, the central figures of Adam and Eve appear like white apparitions – soon to dissipate – while an orange serpent hangs above them, speckled and sparkling with some kind of magic. The title of each work helps tell the story, describing the scene in detail and sometimes in as many as 130 words. This marriage of the visual with the textual is a recurring feature of Lewer’s practice, echoing the religious iconography and narratives of his childhood, alongside art-history references that include the twentieth-century New Zealand artist Colin McCahon.

The suffused, bleeding quality of the Adam and Eve paintings is in part due to Lewer painting directly onto bare (unprimed) canvas, a method he has used in other series, including You Don’t Have to Wake up Fighting Everyday, 2021. An unforgiving material, unprimed canvas has an elephantine memory in that mistakes or changes of mind cannot be rectified, only redirected. Once the acrylic paint goes down, it is quickly absorbed deep into the fibres and cannot be wiped off or easily altered. In this way, Lewer is compelled to work with the eccentricities and anomalies of the materials rather than fighting them. The creative process demands that he embrace the unknown and relinquish control, so perhaps it is no surprise that Lewer describes creating the series as not just involving a ‘tensity of working’ but also patience and freedom: ‘I’ve always been a big believer that paintings do their own thing.’³ibid

In Adam and Eve this philosophy extends beyond the material qualities of the canvas and paint to Lewer’s very physical, even visceral process of editing and decision making. The twelve paintings are the only survivors of 140 works originally made for the series, with the artist going as far as to ‘put a knife through’ the ones that were not working for him.

When Lewer first presented Adam and Eve at the 2023 NGV Triennial, the series was displayed in the medieval collection galleries, home to centuries-old paintings of religious devotion, including an intricate yet monumental sixteenth- century Belgian church altarpiece, the Carved retable of the Passion of Christ (c. 1511–20), originally intended as a focus for prayer and worship. Alongside the altarpiece in this darkened space, Adam and Eve appeared as if illuminated, bathed in an unearthly glow befitting of a Creation myth. Considered in dialogue with these historical works, Lewer’s series joins the long continuum of art depicting stories of faith and religion. But for Lewer – a contemporary artist concerned with ideas and events of our time – the focus was never about creating devotional objects with didactic messages. Rather, he drew from his own childhood stories and reference points to capture and interrogate some of the beliefs and behaviours that seem intrinsic to human nature. However, he is cognisant that anything touching on religious themes can elicit strong reactions, noting in 2023:

‘Other bodies of work I’ve done before, people can take with faith or at face value. But when you dive into religion, people can shy away from it. But it is that feeling, it is the extremes, that I really gravitate towards – whether that’s crime, sport, religion.’

Religion aside, Lewer’s process of working has often been ritualistic and mediative. For his 2018 series There is Light and Dark in Us All, the artist created an object a day for almost a year, amassing close to a hundred fired-stoneware crucifixes and rosary beads – common fixtures in his childhood – in a process he has described as ‘cathartic’ and an exercise in endurance. The knife through the unsuccessful canvases in the Adam and Eve series also feels like a cathartic move. ‘For me, art has always been therapy,’ he says, noting that even as a youngster it offered a means of ‘working my head out.’⁴ibid

Lewer is skilled in using common or collective folklore to share both personal stories and universal experiences. He approached Adam and Eve, which he began during COVID-19, as a way of exploring ‘the broader questions’ of life and humanity, including ‘the rebellious nature of humans’. As with many of Lewer’s projects, Adam and Eve also attempts to navigate elusive, ambiguous and sometimes urgent questions of life, death, the state of the planet, and our place in the world:

‘You do question, when is this planet going to no longer exist? How did it start? You know, these are the stories we were told. And at any moment really, things could change dramatically and we will not exist. That was part of the thinking about Adam and Eve. It was the right time. And I was also kind of interested in this idea of people being told things – not as extreme as don’t eat that apple – but like, wear your mask, have your vaccines‘ ⁵ibid

With Adam and Eve, Lewer has taken two otherworldly characters from an ancient story and rendered them personal, relatable, even contemporary – thus creating a bridge connecting our world and theirs. For the late-night festival EXTRA during NGV Triennial, Lewer also created Confessions, 2024, a participatory installation that involved the artist listening to others divulging their secrets in a custom-made confessional booth inside the exhibition space. Lewer would then live-paint select ‘confessions’ onto pegboard (the same surface used to hang tools in a hardware store, shed or workshop) attached to the wall. Over the course of the festival the space was transformed with an ever-expanding array of confessions handpainted by Lewer, from the funny and mundane (I have afternoon naps / My son wants to be an artist but he’s terrible) to the deeply reflective, searching and existential (Need to love myself more / I told my partner I wanted kids but I don’t).

This knack for relatability and compassion runs through almost all of Lewer’s works. In Steve, 2023–24 (National Gallery of Australia, Caberra), Lewer shares the deeply personal story of a family living with dementia in a way that respects and retains the intimacy and privacy of the family’s experience, while also creating something infinitely generous. Steve is at once a family archive and a creative repository of film, animation, image, found objects and paintings, many of them painted on old formica tabletops – a nostalgic and poignant nod to the important role of the kitchen table in family life. Lewer says the idea for the work actually started with a talk around a formica table, and in spending time with the family, he was reminded that in the end ‘you are left with memories’.

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Elisha Buttler is NGV Head of Audience Engagement and Deputy Editor, NGV Magazine.

The NGV kindly thanks the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2024 for the support of these works.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.

Notes