Art Review: Tim Lewis – Mechanisms @ Flowers Gallery

Tabish Khan
By Tabish Khan Last edited 144 months ago
Art Review: Tim Lewis – Mechanisms @ Flowers Gallery
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London. Photograph © Danny Birchall
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London. Photograph © Danny Birchall
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London
© Tim Lewis, courtesy Flowers, London

If you went to the brilliantly inventive Kinetica Art Fair this year, you may have come across Tim Lewis's bird-like robots.

One month on and he's deservedly been given a significantly larger space to fill at Flowers in Hoxton. Lewis designs and programs moving sculptures to perform tasks verging from a simple back and forth movement, to the kiwi robot that recognises and picks up foam cylinders by stabbing at them with its pointed beak.

All of Lewis's creations have an industrial feel as if they've been designed in someone's garden shed. This coupled with your ability to see the mechanisms at work inside his sculptures, gives them a quirky charm and personality that a plastic covered sterile machine wouldn't be able to convey.

The works are all technically impressive but it's their surreal and eerie properties that make them unique. There is something Dali-esque about a mechanical emu that has opera gloves where its feet and neck should be.

Tim Lewis is a designer whose works you can appreciate for both their technical skill and his artistic vision.

Tim Lewis: Mechanisms is on at Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DP until 14 April. Admission is free.

Last Updated 09 March 2012