Dale Lewis paints contemporary British life at the scale the old masters reserved for saints and kings. His canvases — commonly two metres by four — are painted from memory, without preparatory drawings or photographs, and often brought to completion in a single day. Into them he compresses the ordinary and the extreme of the city he lives in: family life and gang violence, consumerism and desperation, the seaside and the small hours, held together by a bleak, precise, unmistakably British humour.
The pictures are built on a deep understanding of how painting has always organised the human figure. Lewis works directly from the compositional drama of Medieval and Renaissance painting — bodies intertwined across the whole plane, incident piled on incident, monumental scale turned onto the profane rather than the sacred. The result is figuration that feels at once entirely of now and answerable to five centuries of painting behind it.
In 2023 Lewis was one of nine artists commissioned by the Government Art Collection to make new work in response to the Coronation of King Charles III. Sketching from the grandstand at Buckingham Palace and recording the faces of the crowds who came to London for the procession, his work The Mall part of the commission was later shown at The National Archives. His paintings are held in public and private collections including the Government Art Collection, Choi & Lager gallery, Seoul, Saatchi, London, and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, the Zabludowicz Collection, the David Roberts Art Foundation and the Hort Foundation. He has shown across a decade with Edel Assanti, London, and internationally in Los Angeles, Seoul, Miami, Hangzhou and Montreal. His most recent London exhibition, Lost Illusions, opened at Edel Assanti in 2026.
Lewis came to this work the long way. He completed a BA at London Guildhall and an MFA at the University of Brighton before several years as a studio assistant to leading British artists — an apprenticeship in the most exacting, labour-intensive kinds of painting, and one he eventually broke from entirely to make work that is fast, direct and his own. That trajectory, and the discipline of drawing that still underpins everything he makes, is what he brings to the studio at ESOP.
Education
2002 London Guildhall University, BA in Fine Art, London, UK
2006 University of Brighton, MA in Fine Art, Brighton, UK
Solo Exhibitions
2026 Lost Illusions Edel Assanti June – August 2026
2021 Block 336, London
2020 The Great Day, Edel Assanti, London, UK
2018 Free Range, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, US | Fat, Sugar, Salt, Edel Assanti, London, UK
2017 Iconoclasts: Art out of the Mainstream, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK | Full English, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY, US | Dale Lewis, Art Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Figure Out, Union Gallery, London, UK | Jerwood Painting Fellowship, Norwich University of the Art, Norwich, UK
2016 Dale Lewis, NADA, New York, NY, US Dale Lewis, Edel Assanti, London, UK | Hope Street, Choi and Lager Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
Group Exhibitions
2025-26 Happy & Glorious Coronation Commissions from the Government Art Collection – National Archives
2021 The day I saw you: Portraits from the AMMA Collection | Museo de la Cancillería, Mexico City, Mexico
2020 Friends and Friends of Friends, Schlossmuseum, Linz, Austria | Crowd, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK | Ridiculous, Elephant West, London, UK
2018 Entrance Installation, Times Square Space,1500 Broadway, New York, NY, US | Parallel Realities, Galerie Division, Montreal, QC, Canada
2016 Mixed Signals, Christian Larsen Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden | Jerwood Painting Fellowship, Jerwood Visual Arts, London, UK
2015 New London Figurative, Charlie Smith London, London, UK | Summer Show, Turps Gallery, London, UK | Spring Show, No.4A, Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, UK
Art Car Boot Fair, London, UK | The Future Can Wait, Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, UK
2014 A Remembered Dream, The Invisible Line, London, UK TIAF, The Rag Factory, London, UK 2012 To Your Health, Lomography Gallery Store, London, UK
Awards and Residencies
2020 Block 336, residency, London, UK (forthcoming)
2019 Art Athina, residency, Athens, Greece
2018 Arsenal Montreal, residency, Montreal, QC, Canada 2017 Zabludowicz Collection, residency, New York, US
2016 Jerwood Painting Fellowship, Jerwood Arts, London, UK
Public Collections
Fundacion AMMA, Mexico
The Arsenal, Montreal, QC, Canada David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Pictures of Dale in studio copyright and courtesy of Dan Coombs