The Human Figure Reimagined through Paint – The Shanghai Daily

20 March 2026

Walking into the Lisson Gallery's Shanghai space, one is immediately struck by a vibrant display of color in motion. Deep cobalt blues swirl across the canvas, while bright greens seep into the surface like flourishing vegetation, and red lines slice through the composition like sudden gestures.

Look longer, and the paintings begin to reveal something else: bodies.

A crouching figure, a pair of arms reaching out, and silhouettes leaning into one another. They emerge slowly from the layered paint before dissolving back into abstraction.

These elusive figures are central to the works of American artist Oliver Lee Jackson, whose first solo exhibition in Asia opened in Shanghai this month. The exhibition brings together works spanning nearly three decades, alongside a previously unseen sculptural screen.

At 90, Jackson remains one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American painting.

Born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri, the artist grew up in a city deeply embedded in the historical tensions of the United States. The cultural and political complexity of that environment forms part of the background to his work, though rarely in explicit narrative form. Instead, Jackson translates experience into a visual language where figuration and abstraction exist simultaneously.

The body is always the starting point. From there, the figure becomes a structure through which paint, gestures, and space unfold.

These "paint people," as the artist calls them, appear as simple line drawings of human bodies or as serpentine shapes formed by chalk, oil paint and spray-painted stencils. Sometimes they gather in groups; sometimes they appear alone – squatting, reclining, drawing, pointing, or embracing.

Jackson describes his paintings as "fields of energy." The figures are not fixed forms but catalysts within these energetic environments, appearing and disappearing as the viewer's eye moves through the composition.

Read the article in full here.

Image: Installation view of ‘Oliver Lee Jackson’, 7 March – 25 April 2026 © Oliver Lee Jackson. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Photography by Alessandro Wang