LEWIS KOCH lives in Madison, Wisconsin. For the past fifty years he has been working independently as an artist and documentary photographer. His personal work has been shown in solo exhibitions in London, New York City, Rotterdam, Brussels, Seoul, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and in numerous group exhibitions. His work has also been presented in site-specific projects in garages and a series of billboards, and in art journals and artists’ book & video collaborations. Photographs and assemblages by the artist are in permanent collections throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (DC), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Lewis Koch’s work has been described as “remarkable and mesmeric,” “relentless,” and as “a kind of hallucinatory documentary.” Throughout his work, he expresses a desire to organize disparate experience into a unified whole- to give form to the fragmented aspects of what we call ‘reality.’ Drawing upon elements of sculpture, text, architecture, performance and ‘readymades,’ his prints and assemblages call attention to the mundane and unremarkable elements of everyday life, to ‘recognize’ these as the building blocks of daily existence. A review of his work by James Hugunin states that “Koch’s assemblages wed the ‘cool’ detachment of conceptualism to the mysteriousness of the photographic ‘equivalent.’ What contemporary theory understands as two wholly incompatible methods- one materialist, the other idealist- Koch has synthesized in aesthetic terms through a keen eye and an astute sense of formal and conceptual linkage.”
Artist’s statement:
Beginning with the long-held belief in the connectedness of all things, my work seeks to recognize those connections, to document the world by depicting its demons and dreams, to realize the linkage between the personal and the political, to investigate our place in the wider world. In this regard, much of my work in photography and assemblage is concerned with a social and temporal critique. In doing so, I seek to present questions; the answers are for each of us to discover in our own way.
My work reflects a desire to organize disparate experience into a unified whole-to give form to the fragmented aspects of ‘reality.’ As John Muir said so eloquently, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Photographs- their many meanings, their mystery and the spaces in between- help me understand that.
