Lisson Gallery at West Bund Art & Design 2024
28 October 2024
Lisson Gallery participates in the eleventh anniversary edition of West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai with a presentation featuring new and historic works by the artists in its roster, including Marina Abramović, Dana Awartani, Christopher Le Brun, Daniel Buren, Antonio Calderara, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Leiko Ikemura, Oliver Lee Jackson, Anish Kapoor, Li Ran and Masaomi Yasunaga.
Considered one of the most influential artists working today, Anish Kapoor’s practice manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous bodies of work. Garnet (2024) continues Kapoor’s series of ‘mirror’ works – large-scale, concave spheres in fibreglass and paint, which distort the viewer and their surroundings. This particular example sees a protrusion from the centre of its slick black surface, causing the form to resemble a bouncing droplet into a still body of water, or even an inversion, as with a black hole. This presentation coincides with a solo exhibition of works on paper by Kapoor at Lisson Gallery Shanghai, marking Lisson’s first dedicated exhibition to the artist’s works in this format.
‘Marina Abramović: Transforming Energies’ at MAM Shanghai is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in China, inspired by one of her most iconic performances – her historic walk across the Great Wall of China alongside artist Ulay in 1988. At West Bund Art & Design, Lisson shows the gelatin silver print Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977), documenting another of the pair’s seminal early performances.
Following a solo presentation with Lisson at Frieze London, the gallery is also pleased to show Leiko Ikemura’s oil on jute Mountain Lake (2010/11). Ikemura’s painting and sculpture is imbued with a raw and tender presence that highlights the intimate relationship between human, animal, plant, mineral forms, and cosmology, with her landscapes offering a glimpse into her dreamlike worlds that fuse Eastern and Western art styles. Also on view are Dana Awartani’s Where the Dwellers Lay (2023), a work in sandstone that draws inspiration from the vernacular architecture of the ancient city of AlUla, Saudi Arabia; and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Opticks 034 (2018), in which the suggestion of landscape is captured in Sugimoto’s photography of light passing through a Newton’s prism.
Playing with depth, surface and space, Daniel Buren’s PILE UP works are an amalgamation of forms, carefully arranged in a myriad of configurations on the wall of a space. Pile Up: High relief n°B11, travail situé, novembre 2018 (2018) is constructed with two types of aluminium panel – one highly reflective, one coated in paint – bisected by the artist’s signature black and white stripes.
Earlier this year, Christopher Le Brun held a solo exhibition, ‘Phases of the Moon’ at Lisson Gallery in Beijing, in which a new series of paintings highlighted the musicality inherent in his artistic practice. On view at West Bund is the 2023 work Certain Light, in which loosely stacked sections of transparent colour are animated with lines drawn into the wet paint using the end of a brush, resulting in a palpable sense of movement and rhythm. Elsewhere in Lisson’s presentation, Antonio Calderara’s Riva Valdobbia (1957) depicts one of the artist’s distinctively hazy northern Italian landscapes, while Double Cooked Writing (2024) by Li Ran presents a group of his semi-fictional, young intellectual characters, poring over their writing, their pens interchangeable with chopsticks.
Among the sculptural highlights of the booth are a selection of ceramic vessels by Masaomi Yasunaga, whose innovative approach adopts glaze as the primary building material for his works, and Assorted Icons (2022) by New York-based artist Elaine Cameron-Weir.
