Lisson Gallery at Frieze London 2025
27 August 2025
Booth D1
Lisson Gallery’s presentation at Frieze London 2025 brings together works by Sarah Cunningham, Ryan Gander, Leiko Ikemura, Otobong Nkanga, Laure Prouvost, Tishan Hsu, Allora & Calzadilla, Lucy Raven, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tunga—artists whose practices probe the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through sculpture, installation, tapestry, painting, film and photography, the presentation reflects on the fragile beauty of our environment and the far-reaching consequences of human activity on the Earth’s ecosystems.
On the exterior of the booth is Otobong Nkanga’s monumental tapestry Cadence – While We Wait and Watch (2025), debuting here for the first time. Tracing the entangled histories of land, resources and exploitation, Nkanga evokes the cyclical patterns of mineral extraction, migratory journeys and regeneration—poetic meditations on both the resilience and vulnerability of ecosystems.
Also on view is Hugh Hayden’s Zelig (2024), a striking trompe l’oeil sculpture composed of Sharptail grouse feathers meticulously applied to cardboard tubes to mimic the texture of wood. Evoking both natural form and human intervention, the piece explores themes of transformation, identity, and perception. This presentation coincides with his solo exhibition Hughmanity at the gallery’s London space, on view through 1 November 2025.
Ryan Gander’s In the very beginning (2021) reimagines elemental materials in cast bronze, a mutable work that shifts each time it is displayed, while two paintings by Leiko Ikemura conjure hybrid beings of human and natural form, suggesting nature as a site of refuge, healing and transformation. Laure Prouvost extends this notion through immersive, humorous works that envision nature empowered— a new chandelier by the artist, featuring her recurring motif of the breast, anchors the booth.
Tishan Hsu’s stomata-skin (2025) extends his exploration of an embodied technological emergence that encompasses both the human and non-human, the technological and organic. The work uses material and virtual presence to propose unfolding interfaces that are forming an emerging “human” syntax, materially, conceptually, and cognitively. The use of the microscopic image of the leaf stomata as a plant skin echoes Hsu’s recurring use of bodily orifices and medical imagery from human skin as an interface between the organic and technological realm.
Allora & Calzadilla’s Graft (Tabebuia Rosea) (2021) spreads across the floor in thousands of hand-painted blossoms, cast from Caribbean roble trees in varying states of decomposition. The work reflects on biodiversity, climate change and the enduring legacies of colonial exploitation. Similarly, Lucy Raven interrogates the hidden costs of industry and infrastructure in Deposition, Dam Breach 12 (2024). Formed from the sediment of a demolished dam, these silk-lined works embody the force of displacement, recalling both geological processes and the romanticized landscapes of 19th-century painting.
A photograph from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascape Series, Lake Superior, Eagle River (2003), deepens this meditation on time, stillness and the sublime, while works by Sarah Cunningham and Tunga further entwine natural and human expression through alchemical transformations of material and form.
Together, these artists propose a critical and poetic reflection on the precarity of the natural world. Lisson Gallery’s Frieze London presentation is at once a lament and a call to attention—an invitation to rethink our place within the vast, interconnected systems of life that sustain us.
Image: Lucy Raven, Deposition, Dam Breach 12, 2024, Sand, dirt, cement, saltwater, silk, wood and aluminum, 141 x 306.1 x 15.9 cm, 55 1/2 x 120 1/2 x 6 1/4 in © Lucy Raven, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
