Lisson Gallery at Paris+ par Art Basel 2023
4 October 2023
Lisson Gallery returns to Paris+ par Art Basel for the fair’s 2023 edition with a selection of works from its roster of artists, highlighting recent and historical painting and sculpture by Ai Weiwei, Olga de Amaral, Ryan Gander, Rodney Graham, Hugh Hayden, Anish Kapoor, Lee Ufan, Richard Long, Jack Pierson, Bernard Piffaretti, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Laure Prouvost, Sean Scully and more.
The fair also marks Lisson’s first presentation of work by two new artists to the gallery roster: Kelly Akashi and Dexter Dalwood. Akashi, the Los Angeles based artist, presents a new sculpture titled Cosmos (2023). In this work, a lost-wax cast bronze hand appears from the wall holding a string of delicately glass-blown flowers, a poetic nod to the temporality of the human experience and the Japanese custom of mono no aware or “a wistful awareness of impermanence”.
Alongside this, Dexter Dalwood also exhibits a work with Lisson Gallery for the first time, presenting the 2022 oil on canvas, Reforma. Dalwood’s paintings translate real-world events into imagined and composite landscapes, with an acute understanding and referencing of past artistic genres recently giving way to a style all his own: one that evades figurative tropes, in favour of uninhabited and uncertain spatial concerns, shifting scales and compressed picture planes.
Lisson Gallery is also pleased to present a new wall-based text sculpture by Jack Pierson, IDEAS (2023) following the artist’s first solo show with the gallery in New York (7 September – 14 October). Comprising selections of found lettering, reclaimed from redundant signage, Pierson’s text works exemplify his process of sculptural assemblage and non-hierarchical cultural compilation to create personal and universal narratives across love, longing, kinship, poetry, and identity.
Further highlights include a series of ceramic masks from Wael Shawky’s latest film I am Hymns of the New Temples (2022), an epic tale filmed among the ruins of ancient Pompeii; a curved wood panel Untitled (2023) by Joanna Pousette-Dart; the multi-part Constellation O (1969) by Leon Polk Smith; and a selection of oil on paper and large-scale paintings on canvas by Rodney Graham, the latter from his Cubist-inspired series of compositions first shown by Lisson Gallery in 2021. These are shown alongside a new acrylic on canvas painting from Lee Ufan’s Response series.
Also debuting in Paris is a monumental new sculpture by Hugh Hayden, Us (2023), in which a meticulously carved skeleton torso in cherry wood hangs within a ready-made ornate timber armoire. Riffing off the trope of the ‘skeleton in the closet’, the work furthers Hayden’s practice of crafting metaphors for human existence and past experiences, encouraging us to question the social dynamics between the works’ components.
Click here to preview a selection of the artworks on view.
Shown here: Kelly Akashi, Cosmos (2023), Lost-wax cast bronze, flame-worked borosilicate, 38.1 x 15.2 x 14 cm, 15 x 6 x 5 1/2 in © Kelly Akashi, courtesy Lisson Gallery