Lisson's Alex Logsdail and Gary Waterston speak to the Financial Times about the sustainable gallery model

24 October 2025

Speaking to the Financial Times' Melanie Gerlis – amongst news of galleries downsizing in the face of economic pressures and digital competition – Alex Logsdail says: It is not yet time to write industry obituaries. “To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of the art gallery’s death are greatly exaggerated”. He adds a convincing defence of galleries’ importance: “They are open all year round, for free, and — this is not said loudly enough — the gallery really is the best place to see a full expression of what an artist is trying to do.”

The gallerist, whose six spaces span Los Angeles to Shanghai, says that “everyone is aware that there are struggles in the market, but these are not unique to the art world . . . We’ve gone through an extraordinary amount of tumultuous economic activity in the past five years.” Now, he concedes, “there is a natural correction” and, as a result, “you make your best educated guess about the direction of travel and adjust accordingly.”

Less is more seems the mantra for this new direction. Logsdail says that after a period of rapid expansion beyond Lisson’s London HQ since 2016, they are now more “restrained”. “We are not interested in opening more spaces,” he says. Should a new geographic opportunity arise, it is a case of “one in one out.”

It is a tricky balancing act as art world activity — in the form of fairs, exhibitions and other events — seems relentless and increasingly expensive to organise. Logsdail talks of being more “targeted” in an effort to “go back to a slow and considered way of doing things”. At its peak, the gallery was doing 16 art fairs per year, while he now aims for “sub-10”, he says. “We don’t want to do more than we can handle. We cannot be everywhere all the time and keep the quality of our presentations.”

The article also announces the hire of Gary Waterston as Lisson's new Managing Director:

The gallery has hired a new managing director, Gary Waterston (previously at Pace and Gagosian galleries), to oversee the increasingly operational nature of running a business efficiently while keeping Lisson true to what he describes as an artist-first ethos. “Alex does not want to throw the baby out of the bathwater and change the business,” Waterston says of his new boss. “He wants to protect the culture, it is part of the success of the gallery,” which has run for 58 years.

While much of the art market seems obsessed with how to bring in the Gen Z collector, Logsdail finds the challenge is as much with the older crowd. “People are bored of being fed what they already know,” he says. At Lisson, “the artists and exhibitions that have been the most successful have been largely the ones that have been a bit more experimental”. These include a 2023-24 Hugh Hayden exhibition in LA for which the Texas-born artist put sculptures peppered with found materials including tree branches and medical equipment inside toilet stalls: artworks that addressed unexpectedly profound themes including police violence. One other effect, Logsdail notes, was to slow down the process of looking at the art. “If you wanted to see the show, you couldn’t in under 25 minutes,” he says — the antithesis of today’s gallery-hopping habits.

Read the full article via the FT here.

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