Syd Henry Lewis is an emerging Canadian visual artist working primarily in abstract painting and collage, alongside photography and printmaking. He earned his BFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2026, and has also studied studio art and art history at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, McGill University, and the Art Students League of New York. At the Art Students League, he studied Colour Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction with Pat Lipsky, James Little, and Ronnie Landfield, and completed consecutive summer studio apprenticeships with Lipsky in New York City in 2024 and 2025.
Lewis’s work has appeared in Roundabout: Journal of Urban Geography (Concordia University), Narrow Margin Film Quarterly, Yolk Literary, and the UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Visual Art, as well as in programs for the Gibney Dance company in New York. He has exhibited in Vancouver, Montréal, and New York, including the 2024 Grant & Merit Scholarship Recipients Exhibition at the Art Students League, where he was awarded a Merit Scholarship. Lewis lives and works in London.
Artist Statement: My practice is informed by urban systems, cartography, architecture, the built environment, and Guy Debord's concept of psychogeography, which considers how urban environments shape behaviour and perception. I translate the spatial and psychological realities of contemporary urban space into abstract, architectonic patchworks that evoke streets, intersections, and façades. The grid plays an active role: I subvert its modernist, utilitarian logic through irrational departures from structure, staging a tension between order and disorder as geometric systems falter, overlap, and reorganize through cutting, erasure, and reconstruction.
I treat surface as a site: a field of play and a record of action, where construction, labour, erasure, decay, and renewal leave their traces. Cities are time made visible, documents perpetually in draft: written, revised, annotated, erased, and rewritten. Like a palimpsest, the built environment bears the scars of change and its layered histories. My paintings and collages operate similarly, retaining traces of their own making: marks of the hand, remnants of text, relics of earlier compositions, and evidence of trauma, slippages, and debris. Through additive and subtractive processes of layering, cutting, ripping, and reworking, I build surfaces that are raw and tactile. As layers are peeled back, earlier compositions re-emerge, and the work accumulates its own history. In this way, the surface becomes analogous to a city: continually altered, opened, renegotiated, and reassembled.
