Lisson Gallery at West Bund Art & Design 2023
1 November 2023
Lisson Gallery returns to West Bund Art & Design for the fair’s 2023 edition with a selection of new and historic works by artists including Olga de Amaral, Cory Arcangel, Christopher Le Brun, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Li Ran, Liu Xiaodong, Tony Oursler, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Cheyney Thompson, Zhao Gang and Yu Hong.
Following her first major museum exhibition at the Long Museum earlier this year, Shirazeh Houshiary presents the painting, Flood (2010), highlighting a delicate creative process developed over the artist’s forty-year career, which begins by pouring pigment across the canvas before adding layers of inscriptions on top of the sediments and shapes formed by this liquid ground. Alongside, Christopher Le Brun’s new painting Summerland (2023) exudes a palpable sense of movement and rhythmic energy, alluding to musical as well as literary references. In 2024, Le Brun will present a solo exhibition at the Beijing gallery for the first time.
Liu Xiaodong presents a large-scale painting entitled Melting Iceberg (2018) from his Greenland project. In the spring and summer of 2017, Liu travelled to the remote island of Uummannaq, a small fishing and hunting community in northwestern Greenland where he created a series of works including Melting Iceberg. The artist documented a way of life that is both maintained by tradition and greatly changed by industrialisation, reminding viewers of the precariousness of human life and the instability of a once unconquerable environment doomed to disappear as the temperatures continue to rise.
The West Bund presentation also includes Untitled (2022) by Anish Kapoor, spotlighting his iconic use of elemental matter. This alabaster sculpture addresses themes of duality – absence versus presence, spirit versus body, invisible versus visible, and illusory versus tangible – as well as the physical opposition between the convex and the concave. Alongside this is Tony Oursler’s aU>t-0 (2019) which explores our daily interactions with ever omnipresent technology via mixed media and elements of hand blown glass.
Coinciding with his second solo exhibition in Shanghai (from 3 November to 31 January), Cory Arcangel’s gold aluminum ‘painting’ from the Alu series is also featured on Lisson Gallery’s booth, inviting reflection on subjects of obsolescence and consumption of raw and digital technologies. Lisson’s booth also features a new painting, Displacement [19937, 4] (2023), by Cheyney Thompson whose China solo debut will be unveiled at the Beijing gallery following the fair (opening 18 November). To create dense and intricate patterns, Thompson stencils thousands of 5 millimeter squares of black paint on the canvas before extending and distorting them with custom snake-like silicone tools.
Other highlights include a large-scale painting by Christopher Le Brun entitled Summerland (2023); paintings by Yu Hong following the opening of her exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah and Zhao Gang, one of the most important Chinese painters of his generation and a new artist to the gallery’s roster; as well as sculpture by Julian Opie and Laure Prouvost.
Shown here: Tony Oursler, aU>t-0, 2019, Glass, wood, LED screens, audio, video, acrylic, resin, and computer, 152.4 x 20.3 x 20.3 cm, 60 x 8 x 8 in © Tony Oursler
