GILBERT LEWIS
The Platform team is diverse, and our taste in art is equally so—but we all converge in our love of this series of portraits by Gilbert Lewis. Portraits are a classic format in the centuries-long history of art, but typically, their subjects are the wealthy and powerful. Instead, Gilbert Lewis paints portraits of anonymous men, whose young faces and bright gazes express awareness, optimism, and innocence. They aren’t adorned with sceptres like Napoleon was; instead, they’re clad in t-shirts and sports jerseys, slightly ill-fitting glasses, and nose piercings. The artist suggests that these everyday people are just as worthy as the subjects of the portraits that hang in great museums and galleries. This is what’s incredibly exciting about the kind of art that eventually makes it into the art history books: To be truly great, the work has to relate to what matters in the time and culture in which it was created. I’m going to go ahead and posit that today, real people, in all of their honest nuance and perfect imperfection, are exactly what matter.
—Bettina Huang, GM & Head of Platform
Gilbert Lewis
Untitled (Young Man with Nose Ring), 2000
Watercolor and gouache on paper
16.0 × 12.0 inches
$3000 (Available through October 31st)
