Lisson Gallery at India Art Fair 2025

24 January 2025

Lisson Gallery is delighted to announce its participation in the 2025 edition of the India Art Fair in New Delhi, marking its return to India’s flagship contemporary art fair for the first time in over a decade. The gallery’s booth will present a compelling selection of new and historic works by a group of artists from its world-renowned roster: Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary, Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Christopher Le Brun, Laure Prouvost, Kelly Akashi, Dana Awartani, Ryan Gander, and Haroon Mirza.

Lisson Gallery Director, Ellie Harrison-Read:

"We're excited to return to New Delhi for the 16th edition of India Art Fair. Lisson last participated in the fair in 2012 with a solo presentation by Marina Abramović. The level of audience engagement we experienced at the fair, along with the unparalleled welcome we received from the art community in Delhi and in India more broadly, have preserved that experience as an all-time art fair highlight.

As a gallery, Lisson has long been engaged with the art scene within India. We worked closely with Anish Kapoor on his first-ever exhibition in the country, which opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi and the Mehboob Film Studios, Mumbai in 2010. This was one of the largest and most ambitious exhibitions of Kapoor's work, spanning different strands of his multifaceted practice. Since that time, we have witnessed and participated in the evolution of the Indian and wider South Asian art scene, and are thrilled to return to the fair with works by an international roster of artists, to renew conversations and build new connections.”

London-based artist Shirazeh Houshiary – who will participate in an in-person panel on 7th February as part of the fair’s BMW Art Talks programme – shows two significant paintings spanning 15 years of her practice, alongside a floor-based sculpture, Cleave (2022), composed of Murano glass bricks in a palette evoking smoke and water. Houshiary’s paintings combine rigorous inscriptions with layers of sediment formed by pouring water mixed with pure pigment, exploring modes of perception that bridge the scientific and cosmic, and draw inspiration from a rich array of sources from Renaissance painting to contemporary physics and poetry.

Anish Kapoor and Hiroshi Sugimoto, two of the eight artists whose work features in the inaugural exhibition at the Jaipur Center for Art at the City Palace, running concurrently with the fair and until 16th March, are represented on the booth by a selection of works showcasing the breadth of their respective practices, affirming their position as contemporary masters. Kapoor’s monumental Random Triangle Mirror from 2012 forms one of the centrepieces of the booth, whilst Sugimoto shows works from three of his iconic series: Seascapes, Sea of Budda and Conceptual Forms.

Elsewhere on the booth is a darkened room dedicated to the presentation of an illuminated alabaster sculpture by Marina Abramović. The work is a powerful vignette representing one of the chapters of Abramović’s Seven Deaths: an operatic, cinematic and sculptural tour de force which reimagines the life and death(s) of the singer Maria Callas through her on-stage personas.

Coinciding with the opening of his solo exhibition, A New Chatpter, at Lisson London, Ai Weiwei debuts works from a new series of ‘merged’ sculptures, which bring his career-long investigation of history, value, and the intersection of personal, cultural, and political narratives into sharp focus. Two sculptures featuring prized artefacts sourced by the artist – a neolithic vase and the roots of an olive tree– are encased in a pixilated mass of toy bricks, their edges rising and falling to both reveal and subvert the objects within.

One of the leading British painters of his generation, Christopher Le Brun brings to Delhi three works in oil on canvas produced in 2023 and 2024 – expressive, lyrical and deeply atmospheric abstractions in which colour, light and texture stand as equivalents for sound and orchestration.

Following her inclusion in the exhibition ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ at the Venice Biennale, Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani displays works from her ongoing series, Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, in which silk fabrics saturated with natural herbs and spices – handmade in Kerala – are spliced and disrupted by tears and holes before being stretched onto frames. The ruptures in the silks correspond to buildings or locations that have been subjected to sustained violence or destruction through war, colonialism or acts of terror. Mending these punctures through the tender, everyday process of darning, Awartani’s work suggests an intimate language for collective healing.

Marking the public debut of her work in India, Laure Prouvost presents Jasper (2024), a handblown Murano glass sculpture in which human, avian, and aquatic forms seamlessly intertwine. Exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition at the De Pont Museum in The Netherlands last year, the piece eloquently symbolises the interconnectedness and mutual reliance of species in the context of climate change and global migration. Celebrated as an artist who experiments with translation across languages and materials, Prouvost works with a distinctive allegorical vocabulary to address complex contemporary issues with intimacy and playfulness.

British artist Ryan Gander and LA-based Kelly Akashi are also showing in India for the first time. Gander presents I be (lxxv), 2024, the latest piece in an ongoing series of gilded, antique mirrors partially covered with marble resin casts of draped dust sheets. With reflections obscured from view, the impenetrability of the work frustrates the gaze of the viewer, revealing the barriers inherent in self-realisation. Akashi’s deft understanding of materials – her practice encompasses an ever-expanding repertoire of processes including glass-blowing, casting, candle-making and stone carving – is showcased in a group of works which morph mercurially between states, simultaneously referencing the body, the natural world, and imagined interior landscapes.