Margo Lewers A House Full Of Paintings

A House Full of Paintings is a survey exhibition of works celebrating the power and range of 20^th Century Modernist artist, Margo Lewers. The exhibition reflects on a time in the late 1960s when Margo lived alone here in her former home, now the Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest. Her husband, the sculptor Gerald Lewers had since passed, and her daughters Darani and Tanya were pursuing their own careers in Sydney.

As Margo prepared for the first solo exhibition of her work to be held at home in the recently converted Ancher House Gallery, she set the scene, proclaiming in an interview that ‘it’s a house without people, its only inhabitants are paintings’. Paintings were hung in the kitchen and prints covered the walls in the bathroom. The experience of painting was expanded beyond the frame into the artist’s entire domestic environment, in the form of floor mosaics, interior design, architecture, and Margo’s beloved garden that she designed and maintained well into her later years. It was a curiosity as much as a celebration, as guests wandered through the exhibition spaces, and in and out of buildings and rooms that had housed her family and friends for decades.

Margo’s life-long dedication to Abstraction was a way to make visible the intangible. It was a personal expression as much as a refusal of representational form. Emotional response became a primary motivator for artistic creation, not only in the studio, but for Margo it reflected an ideology for a new way of living.

Half a century later, we pay homage as much as to a phenomenal artist as to the power of place, as a site of creative endeavor, experimentation, friendship, and family. A House Full of Paintings includes paintings, collages, mosaics, fabric hangings, and plexiglass sculptures, once again set amidst the beauty of a home on the river.