Lisson Gallery presents group exhibition 'Time Curve' in Seoul
14 August 2023
2 – 10 September 2023
EUM the Place, 30 Bukchon-ro 5na-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
2023년 9월 2일 - 9월 10일
이음 더 플레이스, 서울특별시 종로구 북촌로5나길 30
Featuring artists: Sarah Cunningham | Ryan Gander | Shirazeh Houshiary | Anish Kapoor | Richard Long | Otobong Nkanga | Laure Prouvost | Sean Scully
Running from 2 – 10 September, in tandem with the 2023 edition of Frieze Seoul, Lisson Gallery is pleased to present ‘Time Curve’, a group exhibition at EUM The Place in Seoul’s Bukchon area. Featuring a series of works by established and emerging gallery artists – including Sarah Cunningham, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Otobong Nkanga – the presentation centres around the theme of time, the value we ascribe to it, and our alternate perceptions of its passing.
The title is taken from a 2023 painting by Shirazeh Houshiary, who earlier this year unveiled her major retrospective exhibition, ‘Rhizome’, at the Long Museum, Shanghai. Rooted in the tensions between destruction and stabilisation, Houshiary’s methodical painting practice brings together canvas and aluminium with dense washes of pigment and fine pencil detail in a manifestation of the breath – described by the artist as “the essence of existence, transcending name, nationality, cultures”. A 2022 sculpture by Houshiary taking form as a helix of glass bricks, Just So, will also be on view.
Also presented is a work from Anish Kapoor’s series of wall-based mirrors, with reflections that play with perception by simultaneously attracting and enveloping the viewer. Elsewhere, two gouache on paper works titled Passage (both 2010) reveal Kapoor’s investigations into bodily forms through areas of hazy light and shadow. Further highlights include a series of delicate acrylic on cotton paintings by Peter Joseph, and small-scale landscape and figurative works by Antonio Calderara.
Establishing an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms, through associate thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, Ryan Gander’s recent practice has investigated the changing value of time in contemporary society. In this exhibition, a suite of the artist’s Natural Sign paintings on Japanese denim – depicting a slowly transforming full moon – are shown alongside sculptures including Two hundred and fifty seven degrees below every kind of zero (2018), a fibreglass replica of a balloon that appears to float in the corner of the space. Gander’s work exploring the fluctuating value systems of time, opportunity and attention was the subject of a solo show at Seoul’s Space K in the summer of 2021.
Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary, research-based practice examines the complex social, political, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Presented at EUM The Place is a 2022 sculptural work, Relentless Blows, and an example of the artist’s intricate hanging tapestries. Nkanga’s sculpture, tapestry, film and photographic work were most recently presented by Lisson in the London group exhibition, ‘Matter as Actor’ (3 May – 24 June 2023), and Nkanga will be the subject of a solo show with the gallery in 2024.
Lisson Gallery is also pleased to introduce new work by the painter Sarah Cunningham, as the artist’s debut presentation in South Korea, following her first solo exhibition at the Gallery in London this summer. Checkmate (2023) is an oil on canvas work emerging from a painting practice in which Cunningham builds up complex spatial structures through gestural marks, in a process of continual obliteration and overpainting, until hidden worlds and pastures appear.
Image: Shirazeh Houshiary, Time curve, 2023, Pigment and pencil and black Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium, 120 x 120 x 4 cm, 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 x 1 5/8 in © Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lisson Gallery
