Lisson Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles 2024

30 January 2024

Lisson Gallery participates in the fifth edition of Frieze Los Angeles with a presentation of new and historic work by its artists including Olga de Amaral, Kelly Akashi, Sarah Cunningham, Dexter Dalwood, Rodney Graham, Van Hanos, Carmen Herrera, Anish Kapoor, and Hélio Oiticica, among others. The gallery also presents work by Hiroshi Sugimoto for the first time following announcement of representation in January 2024, and ahead of the artist’s first Lisson Gallery exhibition, opening in New York in May.

Sugimoto’s rigorous and scientific approach to subject matter characterises a lifelong commitment to experimentation with lens-based media. Studio Drive-In, Culver City forms part of a series of long-exposure photographs taken by the artist in 1993 at drive-in movie theaters in and around Los Angeles. This particular large-format exposure captures a screening of 1992’s The Bodyguard, with the final image the result of the movie’s two hours and nine minutes running time. Presenting no discernable image from the film itself, the expanse of the drive-in screen here becomes a monumental, light-emanating form, speaking to a ‘presence through absence’ that pervades Sugimoto’s work.

Coinciding with the exhibition ‘Rodney Graham: Paintings and Lightboxes’ at Lisson’s Los Angeles space, the gallery brings to Frieze a painting by the late Canadian artist. Although best known for his conceptual practice as a photographer and installation artist, Graham often turned to painting, stitching together motifs from previous bodies of his own work and art historical styles to form an harmonic, graphic outcome all his own. Through layering and superimposition in works such as Untitled (2022), Graham achieved the painterly equivalent of an all-over Cubism in his later painted works.

Through an acute understanding and referencing of past artistic genres in his painting, as well as nods to personal and world events, Dexter Dalwood’s works alight on the construction of history and relationship of that history to the present. One of a series titled An Inadequate Painted History of Mexico, Wall (2017) makes light reference to the proposed border-wall between the United States and Mexico, as well as a bygone cinematic vision of the ‘wild west’ with its use of the classic Masterson font. A 2024 diptych by Sarah Cunningham sees the artist’s complex psychological environments rendered in wave-like areas of blues and strokes of black, while further painting highlights include the large-scale Constellation Y from Smith’s seminal Constellations multi-panel canvas series; Hélio Oiticica’s Untitled (Metaesquema) (1958) in gouache on cardboard; Christopher Le Brun’s luminous oil on canvas untitled (pale) (2023); and the shaped panel Floating World #5 (2019-21) by Joanna Pousette-Dart.

Ahead of his participation in this year’s Venice Biennale, representing Britain, Lisson shows two works from John Akomfrah’s 2021 series of photo-texts exploring colour, race and the legacy of ‘The Great Chain of Being’, in which film stills of 1950s actors Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge are set alongside enigmatic statements on race and blocks of color that reference the Shirley card – used in color-film technology to calibrate skin-color balance which for decades only saw white models used to set their parameters. The gallery also shows the 2022 ceramic sculpture Muse 1 by Wael Shawky, ahead of his solo presentation in Venice for the Egypt Pavilion.

Further into the booth, a suite of intimately scaled linen, gesso and gold leaf works by Olga de Amaral will also be shown, alongside the artist’s larger Cuarzo 1 (2015), as well as the wall-mounted Estructura sculpture Azul Tres (1971/2016) by Carmen Herrera, and large-scale concave ‘mirror’ work by Anish Kapoor.

Following his debut Los Angeles exhibition at Lisson (18 November 2023 – 13 January 2024), Hugh Hayden presents a new suite of cast metal skillets – a form the artist continues to explore as a symbol of African cookware with the addition of traditional mask-like facial features. Recent sculpture by Kelly Akashi will also be on view with Life Forms (2022-2023), in which the artist experiments with forms of casting, often using her own hands and markers for the passage of time. The presentation also a 2023 watercolour work from Allora & Calzadilla’s Aeolian Chart series, a selection of which will be on view in the artists’ solo exhibition ‘Gǎnyìng’ at Lisson Gallery Shanghai (opening 23 February).

As a continuation of their Frieze London 2023 collaboration, Laure Prouvost and luxury beauty brand Poiret will transform Poiret’s Frieze Los Angeles space into a charitable pop-up flower market. The Poiret booth will sell a variety of plants, accompanied by an edition of 100 hand-painted labels made by the artist. The funds from the plants' sales will go towards Prouvost’s charity project, Oui Grow, which aims to expand green spaces in the industrial neighbourhood of Molenbeek, Brussels. Poiret’s booth will also feature Prouvost’s 2018 film, Monteverdi Ici.