Lisson Gallery at TEFAF New York 2023
6 April 2023
May 12 – 16, 2023
Park Avenue Armory, New York
Lisson Gallery is pleased to return to TEFAF New York with a selection of new and historical works by a range of the gallery’s artists, including Olga de Amaral, Rodney Graham, Carmen Herrera, Anish Kapoor, Richard Long and Sean Scully.
A highlight of the booth is Wall Dark Blue (2022), a new painting by Sean Scully that continues the artist’s Wall of Light series. Spanning over three decades, the series began after the Scully made the first of several influential trips to Mexico in 1983, where he used watercolor for the first time to portray the patterns of light and shadows he experienced on the stacked stones of local walls and ruins. The ongoing series of paintings features piled rectangles of color, stacked in alternating horizontal and vertical formats with traces of space where light peaks through the aggregation. In Wall Dark Blue, hints of red and orange radiate through dark bricks of black, grey, blue and green. The new painting references Mooseurach (2002), which was featured in Sean Scully’s recent solo retrospective, The Shape of Ideas, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2022.
In the middle of the booth sits a sculpture by Anish Kapoor created using the Vantablack nano-technology, a series that was unveiled for the first time in his major dual-site exhibition across the Gallerie dell'Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, April 2022. This new work, entitled Non-Object (Black), XXXIV (2018) and exhibited for the first time, plays with the notion of the surface as a veil between inner and outer, the tangible and intangible. Following this, Kapoor will present an exhibition across both of Lisson Gallery’s New York spaces, opening November 2, 2023.
Painted during a consequential trip to Cuba, Carmen Herrera’s Habana Series #21 (1950-1952) features notable gestural abstraction that was a result of what the artist described as a visceral response to returning to her home country. Citing a feeling of oppression during her travels away from New York and Paris, and an awareness of the arrival of Tachisme in Mid-Century Europe, the works in this series contain broad, vigorous curves and a range of tropical colors that rarely appear in Herrera’s work.
A new clay on aluminum work by Richard Long is also featured in the booth. Long’s mud works, key facets in the artist’s practice, utilize a natural, unorthodox material applied directly to the surface in bold, gestural strokes. Untitled (2023), the newest in an important series, is the resulting image of both Long’s fast-moving hand and by the natural forces of gravity acting by chance with the watery clay.
Three Cubo-Automatist Compositions (all 2006) by Rodney Graham also highlight a form of abstraction specific to the artist. Graham proposes the idea of a self-taught artist somehow stumbling across a personal abstract style in painting. The paintings re-discover classical modernist tropes without obvious irony. He employs a version of cubism that seems to emulate that of Pablo Picasso from the nineteen-twenties.
Olga de Amaral’s layered textiles highlight the movement in the artist’s oeuvre through the influence of Modernism to latter-day developments in experiential art, optical abstraction and post-Minimalism. Sol Cuadrado 2 (1993) is a shimmering and intricate sculpture that is the result of a meticulous process of covering, building, weaving and constructing. The surface is comprised of linen, gesso, acrylic and gold leaf seamlessly blending together geometric and fluid arrangements of painted and gilded strands into one.
