Amsterdam Grand Opening: Proost!

This body of work originated earlier this year as part of Lewis Bag, an experimental, full-service cocktail lounge conceived and operated by the artist within his studio. Each drawing in the series functions as a page from the Spring/Summer 2025 cocktail menu, from which guests can order during private appointments. The project marks Lewis’s first foray into creating an original cocktail menu, an inventive blend of new recipes and subtle variations on familiar classics.

More than a temporary installation or social experiment, Lewis Bag unfolds as a study in communication, atmosphere, and coded exchange. The lounge becomes a setting where conversation, gesture, and rumor carries as much weight as the cocktail drawings on the wall. The works that emerge from this environment translate that energy of language shared, secrets half-told, and stories suspended between people into visual form.

In Proost!, Lewis continues his exploration of the written and spoken word as a medium for abstraction. The cocktail drawings capture the dual nature of hospitality: its choreography of openness and performance, its undercurrent of intimacy and artifice. Each menu page becomes both an invitation and a record of human interaction, part document and part improvisation.

Translating the ephemerality of a night’s exchange into enduring form, Proost! expands Lewis’s practice of using text and mark-making to trace the dynamics of connection. The series invites viewers to consider how language, like a cocktail, can both reveal and conceal, mix truth with invention, and leave its residue in memory.