Viewing Dazzle Camouflage

An art match made in heaven.

Anna Liber Lewis is setting the art world alight with Dazzle Camouflage – a solo exhibition hosted by Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne in North Parade Avenue, Oxford.

Using her unique language of painterly abstraction, Liber Lewis’ paintings are organised around a self-reinforcing visual system, whereby a set of formal parameters informs how the image is constructed.

These new paintings by Liber Lewis are made through a process of building and erasing, using the language of print and drawing, working across multiple canvases simultaneously, responding and reacting to each other in a generative process. Using the power dynamic created by colour, line and shape, Anna Liber Lewis is interested in how the retina of the human eye collects imagery, as the brain completes scattered clues into coherent forms.

‘Dazzle camouflage’ or ‘dazzle painting’, an idea introduced by marine artist Norman Wilkinson during the First World War, was created not to conceal but to throw the enemy off course. This form of camouflage was used to help protect ships by employing techniques that resembled those of avant-garde British painters such as Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg, consisting of complex brightly coloured zig-zag lines and geometric shapes.