Lisson Gallery at Frieze Seoul 2024

25 July 2024

Lisson Gallery returns to Seoul for the third edition of Frieze, taking place from 4–7 September at COEX. The gallery’s presentation highlights a selection of new and recent works by the artists in its programme including Kelly Akashi, Sarah Cunningham, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Ryan Gander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Oliver Lee Jackson, Anish Kapoor, Otobong Nkanga, Julian Opie and Lucy Raven. Frieze Seoul also marks Lisson Gallery’s first presentation of work by the Swiss-Japanese artist, Leiko Ikemura, ahead of her solo presentation with the gallery at Frieze London this October.

Among the highlights of Lisson’s Seoul presentation is the large-scale work by Sarah Cunningham, Channel Crossing (2024). In airy blue hues with flashes of orange and pink, the work follows Cunningham’s solo show ‘Flight Paths’ at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles (20 June – 24 August 2024), which showcased new paintings comprising sweeping side-to-side brushstrokes and top-to-bottom marks that seem to open up the canvases to the sky, or delve down into the ocean’s depths. Alongside this, the gallery’s inaugural presentation of work by Leiko Ikemura comprises new painting by the artist, who has continued to explore themes of transition, cross-culturalism, collective responsibility, and sexuality since the 1980s.

Following the artist’s inaugural exhibition with Lisson New York (2 May – 2 August 2024), Hiroshi Sugimoto shows Five Elements 328, South Pacific Ocean, Maraenui (1990/2012) from his Five Elements sculptural series. Sugimoto’s photography, sculpture, architecture and performance work manipulates the inexorable march of time and the vast mysteries of space, stalling the clock in order to create monumental forms from historically significant or fleetingly poetic moments. His captures of seascapes from around the world encapsulate for the artist the very essences of life – water and air – as well as his own earliest sensorial memories from childhood. Lisson Gallery’s booth also presents photography from Sugimoto’s Seascapes and Opticks series.

Alongside this, Anish Kapoor presents a new, large-scale mirror work, whose reflections simultaneously attract and swallow their viewer. Kapoor’s mirror works and monumental sculptural forms manoeuvre between vastly different scales and materials, to investigate the polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. The presentation also features a new sculpture in bronze and glass by Kelly Akashi, and a new work in glass and hand-twisted rope by Otobong Nkanga.

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg opened their first major solo exhibition in South Korea at Seoul’s SONGEUN Art Space in May 2024, which presented new sculptures in copper alongside the duo’s previous animated film works and other sculptural series. Lisson’s booth offers a glimpse into the dream-like space created at SONGEUN through small-scale, gold-plated creatures and brightly coloured flora and fauna from the series The Enchanted Garden.

Also on view is new portraiture by Julian Opie, rendered in brightly-coloured overlaid acrylic panels, and Ryan Gander’s Echo Portrayal - Olive and Penny envisaging a T-rex in the cafe of the National Musuem of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2016 (2017), one of a series of ‘portraits’ in which the palette used to mix the acrylic paint is displayed instead of the resulting painting.

Alongside the fair, in collaboration with Hanwha, Lisson is also pleased to present Devon Turnbull's Listening Room in Seoul for the first time. Super Natural #1 runs from 4–14 September, with daily music sessions with local DJs scheduled.

Image: Sarah Cunningham, Channel Crossing, 2024, Oil on canvas, 179.5 x 180 x 4 cm, 70 5/8 x 70 7/8 x 1 5/8 in © Sarah Cunningham, courtesy Lisson Gallery