Tau Lewis - See the True Work of Angels

Tau Lewis
See the True Work of Angels, 2023
Twenty-two-color screenprint on Coventry Rag paper
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 x 20 x 1 1/2 inches (61 x 50.8 x 3.8 cm)
Edition of 30, 6 AP

Printed by Du-Good Press, New York
Published by 52 Walker

The New York-based artist Tau Lewis employs various sculptural techniques to create colorful, totemic forms—all conceived with highly developed identities and narratives that implicate ancestral pasts, spiritual and cultural similitudes, multiplanar existences, and mythical territories beyond our own.

For her exhibition at 52 Walker in 2022, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Lewis took inspiration from the contemporary work of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, classical Greek and Roman mythology and drama, science-fiction stories, and angelology to expand the world-building possibilities of her own characters. Here, in the artist’s first-ever print, four angel heads loom over a crowd of figures that inhabit a blue expanse representing Earth. As the artist describes the present print: “See the True Work of Angels shows the angels breathing fire down on humanity. While the earth burns, you can see floods, bloodshed and humans melting and morphing and growing into trees. The true work of angels is to burn everything down so that it may regenerate. The true work of angels is destruction!”