Curated by Lisa Rosendahl.
“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists; they leap to conclusions that
logic cannot reach.”
- Sol LeWitt, 1969
Read moreOpening 9th July, Lisson Gallery will be presenting an exciting group exhibition,
taking place in both gallery spaces, showing three generations of artists exploring
the idea of conceptual art within an emotional context. The exhibition is focused
on artists that use the supposedly “dry” and intellectual strategies of conceptual
art established in the 1960’s, to trigger poetic leaps of faith and fuel the
imagination. The exhibition will be centred on works that use the logical forms
and processes of conceptual art but endeavour to capture the illogical, poetic,
emotional or mysterious. Many of the works selected navigate between the
analytical and the intuitive, occupying the distance between what we know and
what we feel.
As manifested in Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you or Douglas Gordon’s Every
time I think of you I die a little, the impact of the works sometimes hinges on the
longing for, but impossibility of, communicating with another individual. These
unexplained narratives evoke romantic feelings of solitude and alienation,
highlighting also the distance between the artist and the viewer. In other
instances, such as in Marine Hugonnier’s beautiful photographs of the date line
dividing the Bering Strait, it is the gap between the images and their implied
meaning which arouse our emotional responses.
