Exhibiting in New York is a milestone for many artists. Mario Zammit Lewis has managed to do so with his painting The Big Cat, which is participating in the Art International Prize exhibition hosted by the White Space Chelsea Gallery between today and Saturday.

The artist, Mario Zammit Lewis.

Born in Msida in 1949 to a Maltese father and an Italian mother, Zammit Lewis has already exhibited extensively abroad and is the recipient of a number of international awards that have celebrated his accomplishments along the years.

Using a very vivid palette, the artist’s oeuvre shows an ease across many genres. All of this comes together in a recent monograph publication that explores his multi-thematic approach in detail. It surveys the artistic path of Zammit Lewis and his first steps as a budding artist.

Leafing through the publication, one learns of important thematic and stylistic developments and artists who inspired him along the years.

Some biographical details give readers a background of his life as a young boy and, later on, as a student intrigued by all aspects of art.

In 1955, he moved to England with his family and two years later, moved to Colombes, a stone’s throw from Paris. As a 10-year-old boy, the facades of the buildings in this town fascinated him and he introduced them in his paintings.

The biblical series reliefs in silver of 1980.

In 1963, the Zammit Lewis family again moved to Gassino Torinese, in Italy where he studied architecture. In the meantime, he continued to draw and paint. Portraits of the protagonists of the theatre and the silver screen became one of the defining genres of his early output.

Zammit Lewis’s first portrait in oil was that of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. He refined his technique by copying masterpieces of world art.

This wanderlust can go some way to explain the multifaceted approach of Zammit Lewis’s expression. The publication amply demonstrates his eclectic talents that also include designing furniture and interior design projects. Besides this, he customised anti-theft systems for jewellers and other entities to make ends meet as a student. Zammit Lewis continued his art studies at the Vittorio Veneto art school of Turin under the direction of Mro Pontecorvo.

The publication chronologically investigates the various phases that the artist went through.

The Big Cat

In the 1960s, he experimented with Robert Delaunay-inspired orphic cubism and geometrical abstraction. The early 1970s proved to be a time of still more experimentation as he delved into a Patrick Caufield/ Valerio Adami-stylised simplification of elements that resulted in a pop-inspired output of still lifes.

This simplification and quest for essential elements figures also in other works of the same period, which nod towards an El Lissitzky design aesthetic.

In the early 1980s, the artist created a series of reliefs in silver that reproduced biblical episodes and scenes from Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. This eclecticism in style and medium characterises Zammit Lewis’s artistic development along the years up to the present day.

Vaso di Fiori (1971)

The monograph, or artistic biography, amply illustrates the artist’s love for the nude genre, which he portrays in different states of sensual abandon.

He does not embrace just one stylistic approach to the genre − sometimes he prefers a pop art sensibility, in the spirit of Tom Wesselmann’s Nude with Lamp, while at other times he reinterprets world-famous examples of the genre as he does in Nudo-omaggio a Velázquez. However, his output of female nudes cannot be tied down to just these two examples.

Earlier this year, he was selected by Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi for the Premio Artisti di Avanguardia with the painting Filfla. The magazine Art Now carried features on him in various issues as well.

Model Preparing to Pose

Last September, he was selected for the Premio Internazionale Guglielmo II by a panel of international art experts. The chosen painting, Model Preparing to Pose, was exhibited from September 12 to 18 at the Museo Civico d’Arte Moderna Giuseppe Sciortino, in Monreale, Sicily.

The monograph is currently for sale in Italy and will soon be for sale in Malta as well. In Italy it is distributed by Mondadori book shops and it can be purchased online through IBS of Feltrinelli Editors. A welcome addition to the libraries of Maltese art aficionados and collectors of Melitensia, those interested to purchase a signed copy can e-mail the artist at zlmario1@hotmail.com for more information.

Filfla