Richard Lewer—I Only Talk to God When I Want Something

Multi-disciplinary artist Richard Lewer works across painting, drawing, and animation to explore the human condition. Through his highly autobiographical practice, Lewer illuminates universal and challenging subjects, such as crime, religion, health, and grief.

I Only Talk to God When I Want Something brings together key series that reflect Lewer’s lived experience of Catholicism and the rituals and moral framework that underpin it. From Confessions (2024) comprising 106 painted panels created through a participatory project whereby Lewer heard and then painted the personal confessions of gallery visitors, and Seven Deadly Sins (2023) interpreting the age-old sins of sloth, wrath, greed, envy, gluttony, pride, and lust through iconic art historical images (by artists such as Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jan van Eyck, and John Brack), to Stations of the Cross (2007-08) recording the fourteen stages of Jesus’s crucifixion, the exhibition reveals Lewer’s connection to and interpretation of the faith system under which he was raised.  

Extending on the exhibition’s themes, a new series of paintings commissioned by Geelong Gallery and inspired by the Last Judgement will be premiered.

A Geelong Gallery exhibition

Curated by Geelong Gallery Assistant Director, Curatorial, Lisa Sullivan