Lisson Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024

21 February 2024

Lisson Gallery is delighted to return to Art Basel Hong Kong at booth 1C19 with a presentation highlighting new and historical work by a range of its artists, including sculpture by Olga de Amaral, Ryan Gander, and Anish Kapoor, and painting by Christopher Le Brun, Zhao Gang, Rodney Graham and Yu Hong.

Preceding a major exhibition organised by the Guggenheim Museum at Chiesetta della Misericordia in Venice, opening 20 April, Yu Hong presents a new painting titled Rapids. Similarly drawing from European painting and the complex lineages of modern and contemporary art, Yu Hong is recognized for her large-scale works and multipart series that interpret the raw and often absurd conditions of contemporary life, through the position of the female Chinese body. Further painting highlights include Li Ran’s Becoming a Symbolic Archive (2023), depicting a wistful-seeming group of young Chinese intellectuals, and the 2014 oil on canvas Time by Liu Xiaodong. Comprising 20 panels painted on different days in Gwangju, the work portrays a group of students and teenagers from the generation who did not witness or participate in the Gwangju Uprising of 1980.

First shown publicly in his highly-acclaimed, career-spanning survey exhibition in Venice in 2022, Anish Kapoor’s works utilising Vantablack nano-technology – so dark that it absorbs more than 99.8% of visible light – have come to exemplify the artist’s explorations into presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Presented in a dedicated space within Lisson’s Hong Kong booth is Non-Object Black (2018 - 2022), the curvilinear forms of which, coated in Vantablack, seemingly appear and disappear depending on viewers’ position to it. Kapoor last presented a selection of these sculptures in his recent solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York (November – December 2023).

Lisson is also pleased to show the oil on canvas White Night (2023) by Zhao Gang, ahead of the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Beijing, opening this May. Becoming the youngest member at age 18 to join the avant-garde ‘Star Group’ that would herald the onset of the modern art movement in China, Zhao Gang’s work delves into the fluidity of individual identities, the clash of cultures, and the intricate interplay of fragmented historical events, drawing inspiration from both classical and contemporary, Western and Chinese influences.

Also highlighted in Hong Kong is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Opticks 034 (2023), one of a new series of large-scale photographic prints that rely on a prism to split ‘white’ light into its seven constituent colours. This series will be a focus of the artist’s first Lisson Gallery exhibition, opening this May in New York.

Further into the booth, Ryan Gander’s Temporal Departures (37 St James St South, Manchester) (2023) is a highly polished stainless steel door featuring a sculptural bas-relief depicting the signage, markings and graffiti as they were found by Gander on an original door at the location referred to in the title. Following its fabrication, the artist casts a spell onto the sculpture, transforming it into a magic portal with the potential—dependent on the viewer’s imaginative and cognitive abilities—to transport one to a desired alternate place and time. Shown in the artist’s recent Lisson exhibition in Shanghai is a work from Cory Arcangel’s new series of Alus – aluminum paintings featuring abstract shapes and signatures cut by a robotic laser cutting machine, with finishes reminiscent of those in Apple’s product lines. The lines, curves, and letters have been rendered from vectorized photographs of tracksuits, motifs which have been a long-standing interest of Arcangel’s. Also shown are a new sculpture in glass and hand-woven rope by Otobong Nkanga, and a work from Kelly Akashi’s ongoing Life Forms series, in which abstract sculptural forms are combined with casts of the artist’s hands as markers of the passage of time.

At the intersection of painting and sculpture, Jason Martin’s Untitled (Ultramarine blue) (2020) is a recent example of the artist’s intense pure pigment works, which combine the vigour of action painting with a controlled hand. Elsewhere, Olga de Amaral’s Cuarzo 1 (2015), rendered in linen, gesso and acrylic, presents a layered, complex surface that is at once enticing and luminous. Lisson is also pleased to show three works from a new series of individual portraits by Julian Opie, comprising overlaid acrylic panels in a muted palette of colors.