Gregory Bae and Tony Lewis: Let's Go Exploring!
June 20, 2026 – August 22, 2026
Patron Gallery, 1612 W. Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
PATRON presents Let's Go Exploring! , a two-person exhibition by Chicago-based artists Gregory Bae and Tony Lewis. As studio-mates, colleagues, and peers, Bae and Lewis’s individual practices define an active, critical engagement with the world around us with a soulful awareness of being present–as individuals and in relation. Re-tracing various forms of collaboration and exchange, Let’s Go Exploring! posits friendship as one of the most underrated tools in any artist’s practice. The exhibition premieres a grouping of never - before exhibited works by both artists—tracing and expanding from Bae’s and Lewis’s 16-year friendship forged during their cohort at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This exchange is introduced in the form of a salon-style installation of sketches, drawings, paintings, and ephemera from both artist’s studios. Constructed from a process of revisiting Bae’s archive, largely housed at Lewis’s studio for the past five years, the installation collapses time through references to both unrealized and realized future works, indirect to incomplete thoughts, sketches, and unfinished conversations.