Cedar Lewisohn at The Saatchi Gallery
The Thousand Year Kingdom is the first solo museum exhibition in London of work by artist, writer and curator Cedar Lewisohn. The Thousand Year Kingdom features a series of large scale woodblock prints primarily made throughout 2013; a group of works that have not previously been shown together. Le Document caught up with Cedar to discuss the show …
Cedar Lewisohn Photo credit: Sophie Dawson
LD How are you? Has 2021 been fun?
CL I’m good thanks! 2021 has been fun in parts, and lots of work. 2021 feels like an atom has exploded, and we are all putting it back together, but we are blindfolded. So most of the bits are in the wrong place ...
LD Was your show easy to hang? How did you feel when it was all up?
CL The show was easy to hang in a way, as I had a very clear idea what I wanted to do from the start. I was also fairly stressed out as the work had all been in storage, so I was not sure what condition it would be in. It was also great to hang the show with Alex Devereux, who made the whole process very easy for me. When the show was installed, I was very happy. It was great to see works I’d made in 2013, and see that they still feel quite relevant and fresh. Many of the issues I was just starting to look at then, have really come into the popular consciousness. Who would have thought that ancient museum artefacts would become such a hot topic.
LD Do you have one particular favourite work in the show?
CL I like all the works for different reasons, but I do love the big woodcut print of the Egyptian and mesopotamian figures.
LD Which artists inspired you to make the work in the show?
CL In 2012, I worked on an exhibition called Mesolithic Pop (The New Primitives), with the artists Joel Gray and Francis Thorburn. At the time we were working together a lot and encouraging each other to be more ambitious, so they were a big influence.
LD Which contemporary artists are you a fan of and are there any shows (by living artists) you’ve seen this year that you particularly liked?
CL My day job is as a curator, so looking at artists and exhibitions, as well as putting art projects on, is what I do most of the time. You just have to look at the projects I’ve worked on, to see the artists I like.
LD Do you have a message for the kids?
CL No, I don't have a message for the kids. I’d rather listen to what the kids are saying ...
LD Who is the happiest person you know?
CL I think most people are both happy and sad at different times.
LD Are most people you know struggling to get by?
CL People are struggling in lots of ways. There is certainly financial struggle. I think there is a wider cultural disorientation, that is quite pervasive at the moment. It’s hard to for most people to know what’s going on at a societal level, where we are and how we got here. I don’t personally have the answers of course.
LD What’s next for Cedar?
CL More projects for Cedar. And also lots of ambitions. I’m not personally ambitious. I’m only hugely ambitious for the projects I work on. More art projects and publications. I’ve just been working on turning some of my short stories into Podcasts, so I’m excited by that. And I’ll be releasing another wordless comic book soon, it’s called The Seven Plagues of Seven Angles.
Link to the show here.
Link to podcast.
