Ding Yi @ Lisson Gallery, London - 'The Road to Heaven' Exhibition

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 22 November 2025

For his inaugural solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery and his first return to exhibit in London in over five years, renowned Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi presents a new body of work. This latest series is deeply informed by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China, offering a rich cultural and conceptual dimension to his distinctive visual language. In line with his larger corpus, the artist’s latest drawings and paintings employ a systematic iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response – a continuous act of translation rather than a fixed text.   

In 1988, while a student at Shanghai University, Ding Yi adopted the cross, either in the form of a ‘+’ or ‘x’ symbol, as a leitmotif. Initially arranging crosses in strict grids, he later developed complex geometric patterns in fluorescent colours, producing works that mirrored the architectural and economic explosion of Shanghai in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Since 2011, Ding Yi has shifted toward a broader perspective, exploring themes of the cosmos, nature, and the universe, gradually moving beyond the strict rationality of his earlier work toward a more emotive and intuitive sensibility. Following his 2022 solo exhibition in Tibet, he began to engage more deeply with specific cultural and geographic contexts, with recent works reflecting a turn inward—toward spiritual reflection and contemplative states.

In 2024, following three research visits to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dongba priests, Ding Yi studied and internalised the texts and beliefs of the Dongba religion—an ancient tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. This belief system is preserved through sacred manuscripts composed in a unique pictographic script – the most significant and visually striking being The Road to Heaven. Used in funerary rituals, the long scroll depicts the soul’s symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife, and lends its title to this exhibition.

Drawing from the scroll’s visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a group of works executed on coarse-fibred Dongba paper using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions reinterpret The Road to Heaven through his signature cross motif. The drawing transposes the Dongba writing system into a sequence of intricate schemes, each composed from a dense array of crosses. In this fusion of Dongba cosmology and his distinctive abstraction, Ding Yi invites viewers to perceive two worlds at once—entwined yet distinct in sensibility. Featured in the exhibition is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work on Dongba paper. Each panel alludes to the transmigration of the soul through allegorical topographies: Nine Black Mountains, The Underworld, The Natural World, and Heaven.

The exhibition also features a suite of horizontal-format works on Dongba paper, continuing his iconic Appearance of Crosses series. For Ding Yi, works on paper hold a vital place in his practice, serving as both experimentation and refinement. In these, tiny crosses applied in various colours form mosaic-like compositions that oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Blocks of dense black hatching – inset with constellatory motifs – echo the starry skies that have featured in Ding Yi’s works for two decades. Elsewhere, streaming blue diagonals conjure the two fundamental elements of life,  according to the Naxi – ‘Qi’ (energy) and water, linking to the ‘Twenty-eight mansions’ of Naxi astrology: the nightly resting places of the moon.

A group of larger relief paintings, rendered in chiselled basswood, features tiered zigzags that evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan in the guise of psychedelic abstraction. Coloured diagonals offset the faint underlying grid, while bold geometry, as often in Ding Yi’s art, compresses a sense of the minute, the handmade and the contingent, reflected in the tiny carved compartments that constitute each painting.

Ding Yi defined the first two stages of his career in terms of ‘steadying’ (the cultivation of a formal language) and ‘overlooking’ (the application of that language to the rapidly evolving world around him). The third, ongoing stage is that of ‘looking up’ – of widening his horizons, both spatial and temporal, to the cosmos and its ancient conceptualisations. The mathematical construction of his works belies a deep interest in the idiosyncratic and irrational dimensions of human thought and cultural tradition. The cross itself – at once Modernist and pre-modern, personal and functional – encapsulates the beguiling duality of his art. As curator Cui Cancan has observed, the “Winding Path” of Ding Yi’s practice “has no terminus – it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalisation.” The series of work featured in this exhibition is also on view at Ding Yi: The Winding Path at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University, China, until 9 November 2025.

Artist Ding Yi

A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being. Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, aiming to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings resembling plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures—rigorously precise compositions formed through the

repetition of the cross.

Ding Yi’s methodical structures are animated by vibrant, reflexively chosen colours, introducing an element of chance and tension into the work. Through colour and form, his paintings reflect on China’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with visual motifs echoing QR codes and the sensory intensity of an information-driven society. Since 2010, Ding Yi has adopted a more expansive perspective in his examination of the world, integrating reflections on the broader human condition. His more recent works reveal greater luminosity and intensity, carrying a deeper emotional resonance.

Ding Yi was born in Shanghai in 1962, where he continues to live and work. He studied Design at the Shanghai Art & Design Academy (1980–1983), and later traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts Department (1986–1990). His recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University (2025); Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2025); Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2024), Paris and St. Moritz (2025); Château La Coste, Provence (2024); Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education (2023); MOCAUP, Shenzhen (2023); Mojie Art Museum, Taiyuan (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2022); Jebumgang Art Center, Lhasa (2022); Galería RGR, Mexico City (2022); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2018) and Singapore (2022); Timothy Taylor, New York (2021) and London (2019); Long Museum, Chongqing (2020) and West Bund, Shanghai (2015); Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (2020); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2019); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2018); Xi’an Art Museum (2017); and Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2016).

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively in major international group exhibitions at institutions such as The British Museum, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Power Station of Art and MOCA Shanghai; SFMOMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; MAXXI, Rome; UCCA, Beijing; and touring exhibitions in Bern, Hamburg, and Barcelona. He has also shown in biennales and triennales including the Venice Biennale (1993), Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993), Biennale of Sydney (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012), and Busan Biennale (2016). 

LISSON GALLERY

67 Lisson Street, London

www.lissongallery.com

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London, 27 September – 1 November 2025

Hugh Hayden @ Lisson Gallery, London - "Hughmanity" Exhibition + Biography

Hugh Hayden: Hughmanity

Lisson Gallery, London 

26 September – 1 November 2025

A dining table engulfed in flames, a lifeboat lined with thorns, a child’s dress fashioned from tree bark—these are among the striking new works featured in Hughmanity, Hugh Hayden’s first return to London since his 2020 debut with the gallery was abruptly closed just days after opening due to COVID-19 restrictions. Now staging his seventh show with Lisson Gallery, the Texan-born artist expands upon his ongoing investigation of congregation, passage and assimilation through the transformation of familiar cultural symbols into allegories of community, rupture, and belief. These new works, meticulously crafted from trees through a series of techniques like felling, milling, carving, and laminating, extend Hayden’s sculptural language, while the introduction of painted surfaces signals a significant new expanding element within his practice.

At the center of Hughmanity is The Last Supper (2025), a stretched table encircled by flames and rendered unreachable. Dining tables, he reminds us, are not only sites of joy and communion but also of fraught family gatherings, unspoken grief, or absence. The flames that rise from its surface also echo religious and art historical precedents, from Leonardo da Vinci’s composition of the same name to Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station. Suspended nearby, 13 cast-bronze skillets embedded with African masks extends the allegory. First conceived as “melting pots” in his previous London exhibition, American Food, these diasporic skillets now embody Jesus and his disciples. Their specialized forms and polished surfaces suggest both individuality, purpose and collectivity. Together, the fiery table and its floating counterpart form a pairing that questions the conditions under which communion, whether spiritual, social or cultural, can occur. 

Tension between refuge and danger shapes The Good Samaritan (2025), a dinghy lined with thorns carved from Christmas-tree branches that point inward toward the boat’s center. Partially navigable with its two oars left clear of protrusions and a small smooth space remaining at its core, the boat hovers between promise and threat. The vessel recalls Hayden’s earlier Gulf Stream (2022), inspired by Winslow Homer’s painting of a lone fisherman adrift at sea. Here, though, the narrative shifts toward an allegory of possible survival despite treacherous conditions. 

Elsewhere, painted wooden flags punctured by cigarettes, pencils, snakes or fragment patriotic imagery into narratives of anxiety, erasure, and defiance. One flag adorned with fifty wooden cigarettes in place of stars, presents a portrait of a nation under strain. Another, Gone with the Wind (2025), is studded with erasers seemingly caught in motion. In Medusa (2025), the fifty stars are replaced with carved and painted timber rattlesnakes, their writhing presence casting the banner as both myth and menace. These works collapse the line between patriotism and critique, underscoring how a nation’s or a person’s identity can be rewritten through conflict, erasure, and resistance.

Nearby, a sharply tailored blazer lined with thorns recalls the traditions of English suiting and emphasizes how such markers of status can also torture. Other works, including Pinocchia (2025), a bark-covered child’s dress layered with pink tulle, men’s dress shoes and a set of Mary Jane flats all encased in bark, highlight the tension between blending in and being defined, or even being consumed, by the very structures that promise acceptance.

Taken together, these works lend Hughmanity a spiritual undertone that oscillates between Biblical allegory and contemporary critique. As in earlier public projects—from Brier Patch (2022), a forest of branched school desks in Madison Square Park, to The End (2025), a skeletal form slowly dissolving into the New England woods—Hugh Hayden turns familiar forms into metaphors for entropy, exclusion, and renewal. 

Artist Hugh Hayden Biography

Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hugh Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposing to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, frequently loaded with multi-layered histories in their origin, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees or souvenir African sculptures. From these he saws, sculpts and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating new composite forms that also reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem. 

Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Hayden’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include public art installations, ‘Gulf Stream’ at the Boston Public Art Triennial's Lot Lab, Boston, MA (2024), ‘Huff and a Puff’, at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2023), and ‘Brier Patch’, at the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, NY, which later traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington, DC. Other solo institutional and gallery exhibitions include ‘Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular’ at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; ‘Hugh Hayden: Home Work’ at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; ‘Hugh Hayden: Homecoming’ at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; ‘Hughmans’ at Lisson Gallery, NY; ‘Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular’, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO, USA; ‘Hughman’ at Lisson Gallery, LA; ‘Boogey Men’ at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, which traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; ‘Huey’, Lisson Gallery, New York, NY; ‘Hues’, C L E A R I N G, Brussels, Belgium; ‘Hugh Hayden: American Food’, Lisson Gallery, London, UK; ‘Hugh Hayden: Creation Myths’, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and ‘Hugh Hayden’, White Columns, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Ground/work 2025’, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2025); ‘Finding My Blue Sky’, Lisson Gallery, London, UK (2025); ‘resonance’, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA (2025); ‘Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry’, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2025); ‘Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial’, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, (2024 - 2025); ‘Flowers of Romance – Act Two’, Lodovico Corsini, Brussels, Belgium (2024); ‘A Garden of Promise and Dissent’, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2024 - 2025); ‘Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2024 - 2025); ‘Post Human’, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2024); ‘Objects: USA 2024’, R & Company, New York, NY (2024), ‘Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture’, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2023) and ‘NGV Triennial’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023). 

He is the recipient of residencies at Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland (2014); Abrons Art Center and Socrates Sculpture Park (both 2012), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011). Hayden holds positions on advisory councils at Columbia University School of the Arts, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and Cornell College of Architecture Art and Planning. His work is part of public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, USA; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia; Tank Shanghai, Shanghai, China; X Museum, Beijing, China; Dib Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand; and more. 

LISSON GALLERY

27 Bell Street, London NW1 5BY

www.lissongallery.com

Tatsuo Miyajima: Many Lives @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Tatsuo Miyajima: Many Lives

Lisson Gallery, New York

13 February – 19 April, 2025

Lisson Gallery presents the first U.S. solo exhibition in over five years by TATSUO MIYAJIMA, one of Japan’s most celebrated sculptors and installation artists. Known for his innovative use of LED technology to explore Buddhist philosophy, Miyajima’s work investigates themes of time, existence, and the cycles of life and death. The exhibition introduces four new series – Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN, and Hundred Changes in Life – which build on explorations of ‘Seimei’, a Japanese concept encompassing life, being and consciousness.

These new works continue Tatsuo Miyajima’s signature use of LED countdowns that omit 0, positioning death not as an endpoint but as a moment of transformation. In Many Lives, Tatsuo Miyajima employs full-color LEDs that count down from 9 to 1 before resetting to 9 in evolving colors and speeds. Each LED represents an individual ‘Seimei’ with its own rhythm and identity, symbolizing the cycle of life and death as an endless process of rebirth. Together, these elements form a larger interconnected world, evoking the Buddhist concept of samsara and reinforcing the idea that every life, visible or invisible, has value.

Tatsuo Miyajima understands his Changing Life with Changing Circumstance works as representations of quantum theory. This theory suggests that on the minute sub-atomic scale of the quantum, computational predications cannot hold, and instead, chance and probability dominate. This embrace of unpredictability, change and flux is integral to Miyajima’s practice, and represented in the Changing Life with Changing Circumstance works by the colours of the LEDs which are in constant shift, and the timings of the LEDs, which differ from unit to unit, ungoverned by the whole. As in quantum physics, it is impossible to predict when and where the different colours will occur and how they will appear in relation to the whole.

MUL.APIN, named after ancient Babylonian clay tablets used for astronomy, links Buddhist philosophy with ancient cosmological systems. This series reflects the cycles of life and death through the sexagesimal (base-60) system of Babylonian timekeeping, using LEDs arranged to evoke celestial movements. As the LEDs reset from 0, their random color changes symbolize the dispersion and renewal of life across the cosmos. Through this synthesis of ancient and modern, earthly and universal, the MUL.APIN works situate human existence within the vast, interconnected framework of time and space.

In the Hundred Changes in Life series, Tatsuo Miyajima draws on the ‘Ten Worlds of Buddhism’ states of existence, ranging from Hell to Buddhahood, to represent life’s constant transformations. Encased within mirrored cylinders, the LED numbers continuously shift in color, speed and sequence, creating an interplay between the viewer’s reflection and the artwork. This interaction embodies En, the Buddhist concept of causality and interconnectedness, illustrating how individual states of existence influence and are influenced by external forces. The work’s dynamic configurations suggest the endless potential for evolution and renewal, both within the self and the larger world.

While these new series reflect a bold evolution in Tatsuo Miyajima’s practice, they are rooted in his foundational principles: Keep Changing, Connect with Everything, and Continue Forever. By merging cutting-edge technology with spiritual inquiry, Miyajima’s work invites contemplation of life’s impermanence and interconnectedness, offering a vision of continuity that transcends the boundaries of time, space and individuality.

TATSUO MIYAJIMA

Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan’s foremost sculptors and installation artists. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centered on his use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them, since the late 1980s. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious—though not necessarily sequential—cycles from 1 to 9, represent the journey from life to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’ or the void, which consequently never appears in his work. This theory derives partially from humanist ideas, the teachings of Buddhism, as well as from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with Everything’, and ‘Continue Forever’. Miyajima’s LED numerals have been presented in grids, towers, complex integrated groupings or circuits and as simple digital counters, but are all aligned with his interests in continuity, connection and eternity, as well as with the flow and span of time and space. “Time connects everything”, says Miyajima. “I want people to think about the universe and the human spirit.”

Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, after which he began experimenting with performance art before moving on to light-based installations. In addition to participating in numerous international biennales and important group shows, he has held solo exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (2021): Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan (2020); SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2020); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2020); Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Buchmann Galerie, Lugano, Switzerland (2019); Lisson Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2018); William Morris Gallery, London, UK (2018); Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China (2017); SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2017); MCA, Sydney, Australia (2016); The Met Breuer, New York, NY, USA (2016); Capsule Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2012); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA (1997); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France (1996); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (1996). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1988, 1999) and in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘Change Connect Continue’, Galleria Lorcan O’neill Roma, Italy (2019); ‘The Life of Buddha, the way to now’, Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018); ‘Catastrophe and the Power of Art’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2018); ‘Everything at Once’, The Store, London, UK (2017); ‘Relight Days’, Counter Void, Tokyo, Japan (2017); ‘Kumamoto Admirable’, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Japan (2016); ‘Order and Reorder: Curate Your Own Exhibition’, National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MOMAK), Japan (2016); ‘Eppur Si Muove’, Mudam Luxembourg (2015); ‘Boolean Expressions’, Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Ireland (2015); ‘Logical Emotion, Contemporary Art from Japan’, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); ‘Asia Code ZERO’, Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2013); ‘Marking Time’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2012); and ‘Dome’, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2008). In 2006, Tatsuo Miyajima was selected to serve as Vice President of Tohoku University of Art and Design. His work is featured in numerous public collections including British Museum, London, UK; Tate, London, UK; La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

LISSON GALLERY

508 West 24th Street, New York City

www.lissongallery.com

RELATED POSTS ON WANAFOTO

In English

Tatsuo Miyajima: Innumerable Life / Buddha, Lisson Gallery, New York (2019)

Tatsuo Miyajima: Drawings, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin (2018)

Tatsuo Miyajima, Time Waterfall, Art Basel Hong Kong 2016

Tatsuo Miyajima, Lisson Gallery, London (2005)

Tatsuo Miyajima: Totality of Life, Luhring Augustine, New York (2000)

In French

Tenir compte de l'an 2000 - Gerald Ferguson et Tatsuo Miyajima, Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (1999-2000)

Cory Arcangel @ Lisson Gallery, Shanghai – "Errors and Omissions" Exhibition

Cory Arcangel

Errors and Omissions

Lisson Gallery, Shanghai

3 November 2023 – 31 January 2024

Lisson Gallery presents Errors and Omissions, Cory Arcangel’s second show in Shanghai, following his 2019 solo presentation, Topline, at CC Foundation. Constructed as a focused take on a survey show, this exhibition features an array of the artist’s multimedia projects, including video games, single-channel video, inkjets and industrially-coated aluminum ‘paintings’, utilizing techniques such as AI, machine learning and machine code. The show is anchored by two video game works created nearly 20 years apart — Super Slow Tetris (2004), and /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021). Super Slow Tetris, an original copy of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Tetris has been hacked and slowed radically so that it now takes almost a whole day for a group of blocks to fall to the bottom of the screen (while crucially still playable). /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ (pronounced ‘Rodeo’) is another approach to extended game play, but here a bespoke Deep-Q machine-learning super computing system plays a casual, free-to-play Android game called ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,’ where players aim to increase their reputation by gaining fans and A-List celebrity stardom. /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021) presented in the Lisson's Shanghai gallery is a 3 hour long single-channel screen capture video of /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ playing ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,’ recorded on 14 December 2021.

Connecting these works are not only /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/’s ambient system sounds by musician Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), but a new series, entitled Things I Made, in which various webpages from coryarcangel.com become prints on paper ripped from a HP Deskjet 2710e manual. The prints track the progress of Cory Arcangel’s work over the last two decades and include Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration (2007) and his Self-Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2 (2011).

The show concludes with a ready-made floor installation and a new series of Alus, aluminum paintings featuring abstract shapes and signatures cut by a robotic CNC fibre laser cutting machine with finishes that are reminiscent of Apple’s product lines for both casual and professional users. The lines, curves, and letters have been rendered from vectorized photographs of tracksuits, motifs which have been a long-standing interest of Cory Arcangel’s. Industrially painted in hot pink, each work and its markings are unique. Diamond Plate (2023) utilizes a non-skid, safety surface used for stairs, catwalks, work platforms, walkways and ramps as the backdrop for the exhibition. Notably, the diamond plate pattern was a popular website background in the early days of the internet, and was the background for the artist’s first website (circa 1996). From the ’90s until 2023, Cory Arcangel has weaved and swerved through a career centering contemporary art around ideas of power, digital technology and humor. Errors and Omissions serves as a teaser to Cory Arcangel’s continuing journey. 

CORY ARCANGEL (born 1978, Buffalo, NY), is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger, Norway. Cory Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archaeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning — treating them as subject matter and medium. Notable works include Totally Fucked (2003), a hacked Mario Bros game cartridge where Mario is stuck on a cube forever; Permanent Vacation (2008), where two computers are locked in an out of office email loop; Drei Klavierstücke op.11 (2009), in which Arnold Schoenberg’s homonymous 1909 score is plated by editing together YouTube clips of cats playing pianos; Working on my Novel (2009), a compendium of Twitter search results for ‘working on my novel’; Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011), video games modified to throw gutter balls; Flatware (2018-), a series of abstract ‘paintings’ mounted on Ikea tabletops sourced from a diverse range of leisurewear and, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-2021), a custom built high performance machine learning computer which plays, as it learns, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free-to-play role-playing Android game. Recent and ongoing projects include ‘Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age’ at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France; ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen’, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, US; ‘Rainbow’ at MUDEC, Milan, Italy and ‘Game Society’ at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.

Cory Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have been given a full floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Other exhibitions comprise: ‘Midnight Moment – Another Romp Through the IP’, Times Square, New York, USA (2022), ‘Flying Foxes’, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2022), ‘Topline’, CC Foundation, Shanghai, China (2019), ‘BACK OFF’, Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, UK (2019), ‘Be the first of your friends’, Espace Louis Vuitton München, Munich, Germany (2015), ‘This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous’, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2015), ‘All The Small Things’, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015), ‘Masters’, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA (2012–13), ‘Beat the Champ’, Barbican, London, UK (2011), ‘Here Comes Everybody’, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010–11) and Nerdzone Version 1, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland (2005). Cory Arcangel received the Kino der Kunst Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Nam June Paik Award in 2014. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial (both 2004). In 2014, he launched Arcangel Surfware, a merchandise and publishing imprint. Its flagship store opened in Stavanger, Norway in 2018.

LISSON GALLERY

2/F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

www.lissongallery.com

Anish Kapoor @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, New York

2 November - 16 December 2023

Across both of Lisson Gallery’s New York locations, ANISH KAPOOR presents an exhibition of new and recent works, following his highly acclaimed career-spanning survey at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice last year. The exhibition brings together never before seen standalone sculptures and large-scale installations, presenting for the first time in an exhibition in New York the artist’s enigmatic and corporeal paintings and premiering a series of works using the extraordinary Vantablack nano-technology: a substance so dark that it absorbs 99.8% of visible light. 

Anish Kapoor has gained recent acclaim for his paintings, a long-standing element of his practice that has received new attention over the past decade in museum exhibitions from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shenzhen. At 504 West 24th Street, powerful and explosive large-scale oil paintings churn with expressive brushwork, reverberating between corporal definition and abstraction. Within their seemingly violent energy these paintings contain an intimate and spiritual tension and explore the fundamental functions and poetics of life. One group, titled Ein Sof (2022) refers to the term, in Kabbalah, of the Infinite God – a deity with no static, definable form, one that is hidden and revealed, real and illusory, creator of humankind and humankind's creation. Each vibrant painting reveals the process of bursting out of its own dark shadow with luminous crimson paint, the blood-red material partially defining a figurative object in transformation.

Equally with no tangible beginning or end is Untitled (2023), an evolved iteration of Anish Kapoor’s iconic 1992 work, When I am Pregnant. In that work, a smaller white bump that only reveals itself when seen in profile, re-contextualized the notion of ‘the white gallery wall’ in the language of contemporary art and architecture. While it was art as absence, it was also art impregnated. This work continues the maternal lexicon while developing it further by introducing a black oval void within the pregnant form: an intangible hole that gives no promise for destination, the evolution of the concept of ‘nothing to see’ – just a blinding white apparition, or infinite darkness. Despite being able to see around the installation and cognitively understand the volumetric confines of the form, the internal cavity defies perception, containing more vastness and frightening depth than its container.

Beyond this installation is a dedicated presentation of new gouache drawings. In these works the biological and the architectural converge – in fissures, openings, cracks, windows, passages or conduits which dissolve into impenetrable oblivion. These works on paper are alight with primitive, emotional effusions and yet at their essence bring forth a transcendent radiance, a luminous dawn amongst the bodies.

Next door at Lisson’s 508 West 24th Street space, visitors can experience Anish Kapoor’s sculptures created with Vantablack, a ground-breaking nano-technology material that has extended the artist’s practice into radical new territory, in forms that both appear and disappear before our eyes. Anish Kapoor has been working with Surrey NanoSystems, the company that developed Vantablack, for almost a decade. Like International (Yves) Klein Blue, Vantablack is a method, not a shade of paint or a pigment. It is a microscopic layer of nano rods, so dense that no light that enters can escape. Through these works, Anish Kapoor can transform objects, creating forms which go beyond being. Like the black cube of the Kaaba in Mecca, or Malevich’s Black Square (1915), this is a profound example of the magnetic, mysterious pull of total abstraction and the psychic obliteration that accompanies the transcendence of objects.

ANISH KAPOOR is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, Anish Kapoor manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Anish Kapoor’s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years – kinetic and self-generating – ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times.

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India in 1954 and lives and works in London and Venice. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, UK (1973–77) followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London, UK (1977–78). 

Recent solo exhibitions include Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023-24); Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia and Palazzo Manfrin, Venice, Italy (2022); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen, China (2021); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2020); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2020); ‘Surge’ at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing, China (2019); CorpArtes, Santiago, Chile (2019); Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, UK (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2018); ‘Descension’’ at Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 1, New York, NY, USA (2017); Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); MAST Foundation, Bologna, Italy (2017); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2016); Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France (2015); Château de Versailles, Versailles, France (2015) and The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia (2015). He represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist. Kapoor won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has honorary fellowships from the University of Wolverhampton, UK (1999), the Royal Institute of British Architecture, London, UK (2001) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK (2014). Anish Kapoor was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts. Large scale public projects include Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago, USA and Orbit (2012) in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, UK and Ark Nova (2013) the world's first inflatable concert hall in Japan.

LISSON GALLERY NEW YORK

504 & 508 West 24th Street, New York City

www.lissongallery.com

Jonathan Monk @ Lisson Gallery, London - Not Me, Me

Jonathan Monk: Not Me, Me

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 24 April 2021

JONATHAN MONK’s investigations into memory, ephemera and artistic process emerge from his practice as an inveterate observer, participant and collector of both popular culture and conceptual art. In a new series of collages, collectively entitled Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information, Jonathan Monk charts and revisits some of his own exhibition history using photographic evidence of previous solo shows, harking back to the first museum presentation featuring wallpaper of his own past work at Kunsthaus Baselland in 2016. Copy and pasted, magpie-like, onto the backdrop of these grisaille, archival documents are various touchstones or influences that went into the depicted display, many of which come from Jonathan Monk’s own treasure trove of personal or artistic memorabilia. Actual objects – from teapots and vinyl records to cacti – are perched on the picture plane, alongside framed portraits of his artistic heroes, printed invitation cards and individual works of art in their own right.

For example, Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information III (2020) begins with the wallpaper background of Jonathan Monk’s Paul McCarthy puppet looking at himself in a mirror while dressed as Paul McCartney, in two-dimensional black and white. Between these doppelgangers hangs an original Martin Kippenberger edition, in the form of a retro phone, while the record sleeve of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is placed below. A portrait of Bruce Nauman spits from one head like a fountain and an Ettore Sottsass pepper grinder protrudes like a crown from the head of the other figure. This accretion of images and ephemera creates a feedback loop of creation, appropriation, homage and irreverence.

Each Exhibit Model reflects a mood, a moment in time and a discrete body of work, albeit without including Jonathan Monk’s actual art objects in the physical realm, amounting to a kind of ‘anti-retrospective’, as he calls it. There are in fact many shows within this show, each collage also containing Additional Information (also referred to by the Not Me of the show’s title), ranging from internal and personal references to artistic or musical influences, with famous artists making cameo appearances, including Daniel Buren, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler and Gilbert and George.

More of Jonathan Monk’s artistic forebears are present in this show, through their intervention in a group of sculptural self-portrait busts, entitled Senza Titolo. The otherwise identical Jesmonite effigies of Jonathan Monk have all had their noses removed in the same iconoclastic manner that damaged Roman statuary of old, only these defacements were all by the hand of Arte Povera artists such as Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis. Even Maurizio Cattelan, a near contemporary of Jonathan Monk’s was invited to strike the nose off his face with a hammer, as was John Baldessari, one of the many artist-collaborators to have sadly died since this project was completed in 2012. These vandalized heads represent instances of Jonathan Monk’s work disturbed by the intervention of other artists, while the Exhibit Models strike a less discordant and more-or-less harmonic note when considered in concert with the external forces at play. 

JONATHAN MONK was born in Leicester in 1969 and lives and works in Berlin. He has a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic (1988) and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (1991). Solo exhibitions have been held at Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2019); KINDL – Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, Germany (2019); Vox, Montreal, Canada (2017); The Gallery at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK (2017); Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, Switzerland (2016); Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome, Italy (2015); Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, Ireland (2014); Centro De Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) Málaga, Spain (2013); Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria (2013); Palais de Tokyo and Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris, France (2008); Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2005); and Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany (2003). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (2006), the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009), Berlin Biennale (2001) and Taipei Biennial (2000). He was awarded the Prix du Quartier Des Bains, Geneva in 2012.

Lisson Gallery is temporarily closed. However, the exhibition is viewable in full from the street.

LISSON GALLERY

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NA

www.lissongallery.com

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Joanna Pousette-Dart @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Joanna Pousette-Dart 
Lisson Gallery, New York
29 February - 18 April, 2020

Lisson Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by New York based abstract painter Joanna Pousette-Dart. This is the gallery’s first solo presentation with Joanna Pousette-Dart, following the recent announcement of representation.

Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, and having studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont amongst the likes of Greenbergian Formalists Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. However, despite this traditional modernist background, her paintings remain anything but conventional. Joanna Pousette-Dart’s shaped paintings are unique in their melding of formal and poetic concerns, and take their inspiration from many sources: Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself, to name a few.

The presentation at Lisson Gallery’s Tenth Avenue space features four large-scale multi-panel paintings, each composed of curved canvases, a format Joanna Pousette-Dart has explored since 1990 while working in Galisteo, New Mexico. The dynamic configurations of these works evoke the constantly shifting light and form, the vastness of the spaces, and the sense of the earth’s curvature that she experienced there. Works in the exhibition such as Plateau (2019), measuring more than 11 feet across, and 2 Part Variation #3 (After Pierrot) (2015) evoke the earth’s curvature, as well as the characteristically dramatic light experienced in the Southwest.

The shape of Joanna Pousette-Dart’s canvases are loosely based on parts of hemispheres, and created as an exploration of scale. Early studies into the landscape in New Mexico began by taking photographs and stitching them into 360-degree compositions, exploring the continuous flattened terrain and the dramatic changes in light. Joanna Pousette-Dart noted, “In taking photographs I could see the light changing the interrelationship of all the elements from frame to frame as I was shooting. I began making drawings with the photos in mind, cutting shapes and putting them together and these drawings ultimately led to the shaped panels.”

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s paintings take many forms, each with their own dynamic sense of expansion and compression, buoyancy and gravity. The painted contours of the interior shapes create an added complexity, sometimes echoing the contours of the canvas, and at other times challenging them. While the paintings are considered whole within themselves, the rhythm and light of the painting is intended to reverberate beyond its curved edges.

JOANNA POUSETTE-DART was born in New York, NY in 1947, where she still lives and works. She has a BA from Bennington College, Vermont (1968). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wiesbaden Museum, Wiesbaden, Germany; Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Texas Gallery, Houston, TX, USA; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, USA; and Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, NY, USA, as well as a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Locks Gallery in Philadelphia will open a solo exhibition in April 2020 of new work. Joanna Pousette-Dart has been featured in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, among others. Her work is included is held in public collections around the world including Albright Knox, Buffalo, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, USA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA. 

LISSON GALLERY
138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
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Tatsuo Miyajima @ Lisson Gallery, New York - Innumerable Life / Buddha

Tatsuo Miyajima: Innumerable Life / Buddha
Lisson Gallery, New York
Through February 16, 2019

Tatsuo Miyajima presents his first solo exhibition in New York with Lisson Gallery, premiering his new series, Innumerable Life/Buddha. The exhibition features four works by the Japanese artist, introducing US audiences to his eastern philosophies and signature digital visual vocabulary. This new body of work, a series of glowing red installations, are inspired by a particular Buddhist teaching, reminding us of the power of the individual within a networked whole. A continuation of Tatsuo Miyajima’s meditations on time and its passage, these installations invite reflection, addressing the fundamental concepts of change, death, connection and eternity. The exhibition follows on from recent large-scale public commissions, including Count Down Dialogue (2018) launched during West Bund Art & Design Fair and comes ahead of Tatsuo Miyajima’s largest solo exhibition in Asia to date, opening at the new Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in May 2019.

Numbers are at the heart of Tatsuo Miyajima’s practice. An international language, digits transcend cultures: “Whether applied to mathematics and physics, or language and daily activity, they play a central role in our lives and are understood by all” (Tatsuo Miyajima, 2015). Miyajima’s numbers have danced on walls, in water, on the façades of buildings, in forests and in ponds, on skyscrapers, in gardens and courtyards, and on the faces and bodies of men and women. To Tatsuo Miyajima, technology is an instrument, and perhaps even an organism, that allows the expression of poetry and spirituality through light and movement.

The four new works in the Innumerable Life/Buddha series are made up of glowing LED displays, with thousands of numbers counting down from nine to one at differing speeds, before going dark momentarily. These digits embody the human cycle and the eastern philosophy of change and renewal; each solitary, blinking diode signifying the individual body and soul. The counting sequence continues, as if everlasting, and yet ‘0’, implying death, is expressed solely by darkness. Through this allusion, the numbers – or ‘Life’ – are destined to an everlasting cycle of regeneration. This idea is also reflected in the colour of the new works: the radiant red of the installations denotes the blood of life, love, fire, passion, strength and joy.

This new series is inspired by a legend told in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most important texts in Mahayana Buddhism, recalling the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha, the spiritual teacher who founded Buddhism. Siddhartha was preaching to a number of his disciples and, when asked who would be the chosen ones to propagate these philosophies after his death, he indicated towards thousands of Buddhas arising from a cleft in the earth. He prophesised that these people – the ‘Bodhisattvas of the Earth’ – were the enlightened ones, the ‘Buddhas’ who would continue his teachings in the future. By not selecting an elite follower, or one of his Ten Great Disciples, he rendered Buddhism a divine power for all – regardless of name, power or status.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s philosophy, as told through these works, is that the future is not created by the genius of the individual, but by the collective body. Every tiny diode is small and seemingly insignificant, yet together creates the glittering web of the universe. For Tatsuo Miyajima, each life – no matter how brief – has meaning in the mass.

TATSUO MIYAJIMA is one of Japan’s foremost sculptors and installation artists. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Tatsuo Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centred on his use of digital lightemitting diode (LED) counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them, since the late 1980s. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious – though not necessarily sequential – cycles from nine to one, represent the journey from life to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’ or the zero point, which appears in his work as black-outs. This theory derives partially from humanist ideas, the teachings of Buddhism, as well as from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep changing, Connect with Everything, and Continue Forever’. Tatsuo Miyajima’s LED numerals have been presented in grids, towers, complex integrated groupings or circuits and as simple digital counters, but are all aligned with his interests in continuity, connection and eternity, as well as with the flow and span of time and space. "Time connects everything", says Tatsuo Miyajima. "I want people to think about the universe and the human spirit."

Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Japan. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, after which he began experimenting with performance art before moving on to light-based installations. In addition to participating in numerous international biennales and important group shows, he has held solo exhibitions at William Morris Gallery, London, UK (2018); Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China (2017); SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2017); MCA, Sydney, Australia (2016); The Met Breuer, New York, NY, USA (2016); Capsule Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2012); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA (1997); Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris France (1996); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (1996). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1988, 1999) and in numerous group exhibitions, including 'Kumamoto Admirable', Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Japan (2016); 'Order and Reorder: Curate Your Own Exhibition', National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MOMAK), Japan (2016); 'Eppur Si Muove', Mudam Luxembourg (2015); 'Boolean Expressions' at the Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Ireland (2015); 'Logical Emotion, Contemporary Art from Japan', Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); 'Asia Code ZERO', Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2013); 'Marking Time', Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2012); and 'Dome', Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2008). In 2006, Tatsuo Miyajima was selected to serve as Vice President of Tohoku University of Art and Design. His work is featured in numerous public collections including Tate, London, UK; La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan

LISSON GALLERY, NEW YORK
138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
www.lissongallery.com

Ceal Floyer @ Lisson Gallery, London

Ceal Floyer
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 5 January 2019

Lisson Gallery presents a new exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ceal Floyer, her sixth with the gallery since she first showed in the same spaces in 1997. Over 20 years on, Ceal Floyer has lost none of her defiant simplicity or piercing philosophical precision, producing a distinct body of sculptural works, featuring poetic situations, subtle interventions, as well as new video and light installations.

A sonic experience beneath a clear, parabolic dome, which contains a directional speaker, hung from the ceiling, briefly drenches visitors with a gushing loop of static sound. While Untitled (Static) could be a strangely meditative zone of white noise, within the already white confines of the gallery, it might also act as an approximation of the sound of rain atop an umbrella, creating a momentary trompe l’oreille (the aural equivalent of a trompe l’œil).

Elsewhere, a diptych montage of small-sized images of Hotel Rooms (all works 2018) culled from travel brochures and glossy magazines advertising hotel suites and interior décor, is hung on two adjacent walls. This travelogue of pristine lodgings bespeaks not so much Ceal predilection for ironic image appropriation as it deconstructs some of the hidden conventions of commercial photography: each vista of a freshly made-up double- or twin-bedded haven is shot from either a left-hand or right-hand point of view. Ceal Floyer proceeds to uncannily mirror and re-stage the angle of the camera in a literal way by categorising and placing each image on either the left- or right-hand side of the space.

An understated survey of what constitutes the boundaries of this exhibition continues on the window where two typical hazard signs depict the maximum headroom available both inside and outside, although the extreme unlikelihood of anyone transgressing the height restrictions render these warnings as merely conceptual in nature. Multiple versions of this work, Maximum Headroom (2014/2018), will be adorning the façade of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein until next year, further expanding (rather than limiting) where in time or space Ceal Floyer’s suggestions can exist or operate.

The function or lack thereof in Ceal Floyer’s subversive statements is compounded both by their ubiquity in everyday life and by their absurdity in her hands. As if to ram this point home, the main gallery features an outsized video, Hammer and Nail, of a hammer violently pounding a nail into a board. The progress of metal into wood seems stunted by the movement of the entire filmic frame, which gradually comes up to meet the nail’s head with each blow, enacting a negation of duties and a structural reversal or complication of the usual hammer-meets-nail relationship. Riven through, as these pieces all are, with Floyer’s inimitable humour and rigour, it is no surprise that she has been included in the South London Gallery’s current group exhibition, ‘KNOCK, KNOCK: Humour in Contemporary Art’ (until 18 November).

LISSON GALLERY, LONDON
67 Lisson Street, London
www.lissongallery.com

Ryan Gander @ Lisson Gallery, London

Ryan Gander
Lisson Gallery, London
2 March – 21 April 2018

Ryan Gander’s sixth exhibition with Lisson Gallery draws on notions of time and its passage. With a philosophical overture and a sharp existential focus, the exhibition illustrates the innate ability of all things, in both physics and the wider human context, to naturally self-right themselves. Drawing on the simple yet profound advice given by his father – “Let the world take a turn” – Gander encourages the viewer to sit back and watch, to observe, and allow for a natural course of action, as time has power: to heal, transform, shift perceptions and elicit change. Rather than trying to control time, to stop it or to change it, Ryan Gander embraces a more laisse faire attitude. Things change as the world changes, while everything stays the same, and if we are open to this approach, we can see the world, and our place it in, in a more honest and empathetic light. 

A cube made entirely of flip-dot panels, like those formerly found in public transportation timetables, hangs from the front ceiling of 67 Lisson Street. Analogous to a massive clock, the large-scale installation measures time in an abstract way, showing its passage both audibly and visibly. Different tears of coloured dots rain down each panel, programmed according to an algorithm set by the artist. The clicking sound of the dots is accompanied by Ryan Gander’s voice, telling autobiographic stories that are at once humorous and melancholic. Each story hints at the destruction that surrounds us, shadowed by an overarching sense of anxiety and loss, although not without a touch of the artist’s usual hope and playfulness. The texts, which include a series of poems and essays, will be transcribed on the back of a poster, with the quote by Ryan Gander’s father on the front, the first 100 of which will be given away through a social media competition announced on the artist’s Instagram page (@ryanjgander).

Ryan Gander activates the gallery completely by the passage of time, with the entire front spaces turned into a giant architectural hourglass, fully visible from the façade of the building off 52 Bell Street. At the start of the exhibition, the top half of the gallery will be filled with black sand, cascading down to the ground floor below. As the sand trickles through the floor, it reveals a series of stone sculptures – mythological nymphs like those found in classical Victorian paintings, rendered in 3D with precise replications of figurative poses, albeit removed from their original context and altered by their new surroundings – all the while slowly covering up the sculptural realisation of a Gömböc on the ground floor. A 200-year-old problem solved by the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos, these convex objects have countless varieties but hold in common a simple mathematical equation: when resting on a flat surface, each Gömböc has one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium, adjusting to find balance in its own instability. Domokos equates the issue of a Gömböc not with mathematics but with sociology; he argues that at the end of time, when humanity has long disappeared, everything in the universe will be one of two shapes: either a sphere or a Gömböc. A Gömböc thus represents both the starting point of life and the deterioration of all things. Here one can see and experience the moment of time elapsing. The presence of the Gömböc in the context of Ryan Gander’s installation alludes to both the search for balance in a mathematical sense but also for the redress of imbalance and mass inequality on a global scale.  

The relationship between Gömböcs and spheres is further explored in an oversized snow globe, nearly one metre in diameter, in constant motion with blurred visibility – a snow globe that never stops snowing. Snowfall itself is a temporal marker, a more evanescible sand of time: one wants to know when it will stop snowing and how long it will last before it melts into spring. The work relates to Ryan Gander’s participation in the 21st Biennale of Sydney (16 March – 11 June), where he will turn the UNESCO heritage prison Cockatoo Island into a giant, walk-in snow globe. The globe at Lisson will be presented next to a chair designed in the 1920s by Marcel Breuer, flipped on its side, seemingly discarded and removed of any function, with several inches of snowfall cast in marble resin moulded on top. 

A new font, titled ‘Set in Stone’ and available to download for free at www.setinstonetypeface.co.uk, will feature throughout the exhibition. Ryan Gander and his daughter often collect stones from a nearby beach in Suffolk, and as part of a lesson in semiotics, they created a new Roman alphabet from the stones and turned it into a typeface. The stones themselves are significant in that amongst the millions of them found on any beach, there is an infinite probability that they exist as Gömböcs. A copy of ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ rendered with this font will be available from the desk at reception.

On 14 April at 11am, Ryan Gander will be in conversation with Gábor Domokos at the Potting Shed Bar & Restaurant at the Dorset Square Hotel in London, only a few blocks from the gallery. The event is free and open to the public but booking is required. Please email rsvp@lissongallery.com to book your spot. 

RYAN GANDER

Ryan Gander’s complex and unfettered conceptual practice is stimulated by queries, investigations or what-ifs, rather than strict rules or limits. For example, what if a child’s den of sheets were remade in memorialising marble (Tell My Mother not to Worry (ii), 2012)? What if all the pieces in a chess set were remade in Zebra Wood, so that neither side was entirely black nor white (Bauhaus Revisited, 2003)? Gander is a cultural magpie in the widest sense, polymathically taking popular notions apart only to rebuild them in new ways – perhaps by refilming the same ten-second clip 50 times over, as in Man on a Bridge (A study of David Lange), 2008. Language and storytelling play an overarching role in his work, not least in his series of Loose Association lectures or in his attempt to slip a nonsensical, palindromic new word, ‘mitim’, into the English language. Occasionally his ludic concepts drift into more bodily, relational challenges, especially in This Consequence of 2006, that involved the unsettling presence of a gallery owner or invigilator dressed in an allwhite Adidas tracksuit, with an additional sinister red stain embroidered into the fabric. Invitation and collaboration are also at the heart of Gander’s fugitive art – whether he’s exchanging fictionalised newspaper obituaries with an artist-friend or taking pictures of people looking at pictures at an art fair – although arguably every solipsistic action he takes merely holds up yet another mirror to his ceaselessly voracious mind.

Ryan Gander, born in Chester in 1976, lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions have been staged at the new Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2017); National Museum of Osaka, Osaka, Japan (2017); Cc Foundation, Shanghai, China (2017); Scrapmetal, Toronto, Canada (2016); MAC, Montreal, Canada (2016); Aspen Art Museum, CO, USA (2015); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2015); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2015); Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2015); Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, Mexico (2015); OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria (2015) touring to Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry, Ireland (2014) and FRAC Île-de-France / Le Plateau, France (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2012); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2010); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2008); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2007 & 2003); MUMOK, Vienna, Austria (2007) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA, USA (2007). He has also shown in group exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2008) and the Sydney Biennial, Australia (2008 and 2018). Ryan Gander has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, among them the Zürich Art Prize (2009), the ABN Amro Art Price (2006), the Baloise Art Statements of the Art Basel (2006) and the Dutch Prix de Rome for sculpture (2003).

LISSON GALLERY, LONDON
67 Lisson Street, London
www.lissongallery.com

Carmen Herrera @ Lisson Gallery, London

Carmen Herrera
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 17 February 2018

“I like straight lines, I like angles, I like order. In this chaos that we live in, I like to put order. I guess that’s why I am a hard-edged painter, a geometric painter” – Carmen Herrera, Artists in Exile, 1994

CARMEN HERRERA’s sixth exhibition with Lisson Gallery, and her second with the gallery in London, features an entirely new body of work created within the last year. Featuring a large Estructura, along with a number of paintings and works on paper, the exhibition displays some of Herrera’s most ambitious work to date. Known for her geometric lyricism and vibrant abstractions, Herrera produces dynamic compositions that convey movement and rhythm through a careful balance of lines, forms and colours. Embracing an approach that is at once meditative and reflective, daring and bold, Carmen Herrera’s work evokes a simultaneous sense of instability and order, encompassing symmetry and asymmetry, shadow and light. Rather than tricks to fool the eye, her intent is to sharpen it.

Carmen Herrera’s dynamic use of colour and form is realised perhaps most effectively in her series of three-dimensional works, known as the Estructuras (Structures). The work presented at Lisson Gallery, titled Pavanne, is armen CHerrera’s largest structure to date, originally conceived in 1967 as a monument in dedication to her younger brother, who was dying of cancer. Based on paintings “really crying out to become sculpture”, Herrera’s Estructuras represent a rare break in Herrera’s insistent planarity and rectangular container of her paintings. Moving from drawing, to painting, to sculpture, the physical manifestation of her forms brings to life the precision of Herrera’s sharp edges. As with many of her early Blanco y Verde paintings, armen CHerrera envisioned her Estructuras in an environmental sense, using the surrounding walls as part of the composition. The irregular shapes, unable to fit perfectly together, create negative space to play with spatial awareness and balance. The first Estructura designed to go outside, the sculpture on view as part of the exhibition further extends the possibilities of the work, adding nature or different spatial dimensions into the mix.

The sculpture is accompanied by new eight new paintings, each composed of bands of colour that exist in unequal proportions and are suspended in tension with intersecting areas of black. Working predominately with acrylic, the geometrically-organised, dichromatic paintings contain a range of shapes in different sizes, almost mathematically arranged to create perfect compositional balance. While these works retain a certain luminosity, they are predominately dark, almost resisting colour, and indicate a steady move towards increasingly simplified pictorial elements and a progressively reduced colour palette. Notably uninterested in either the cultural or philosophical connotations of colour, Rob Storr, in his essay for the exhibition catalogue that accompanied Carmen Herrera’s inaugural exhibition of Lisson Gallery’s 24th Street location in New York in May 2016, states:  “Indeed it strikes me as impossible to disregard the existential aura of these latest compositions.”

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, a major exhibition of Herrera’s work first staged by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in September 2016, is on view at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20) in Düsseldorf, Germany from 2 December 2017 until 8 April 2018. The show features more than fifty works, including paintings, works on paper and three-dimensional pieces, ranging from the late 1940s all the way through to 2017.

CARMEN HERRERA

Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour: “My quest”, she says, “is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions” (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Her work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she says, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential” (2005). While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera’s body of work has established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.

Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. She moved frequently between France and Cuba throughout the 1930s and 1940s; having started studying architecture at the Universidad de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (1938–39), she trained at the Art Students League, New York, NY, USA (1942–43), before exhibiting five times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1949–53). She settled in New York in 1954, where she continues to live and work. Herrera’s paintings were the subject of a large-scale survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA (September 2016 – January 2017), which travels to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20) in Dusseldorf, Germany from 2 December 2017 until 8 April 2018. A selection of Herrera's recent paintings and Estructuras inaugurated Lisson Gallery New York’s 24th Street exhibition space in May 2016. Carmen Herrera has also had solo exhibitions at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2009); and Museo del Barrio, New York City, USA (1998). She has been included in the group shows 'Post War: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945-1965', Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2016); ‘Order, Chaos and the Space Between’, Phoenix Museum of Art, Arizona, USA (2013); and ‘The Geometric Unconscious: A Century of Abstraction’, Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska, USA (2012). She was awarded two fellowships from the Cintas Foundation, New York, USA (1966–68) and a grant by the Creative Artists Public Service, New York, USA (1977). Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Tate Collection, London, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, USA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA

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Roy Colmer @ Lisson Gallery, London

Roy Colmer
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 13 January 2018

Lisson Gallery presents ROY COLMER’s first-ever solo exhibition in London and the gallery’s inaugural project with the artist in the United Kingdom. Influenced by the likes of Arshile Gorky, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik and Jackson Pollock, with a career spanning five decades, Roy Colmer’s work holds an important place in the narrative of contemporary art. The presentation at Lisson Gallery highlights Roy Colmer’s unique visual language by bringing together eight paintings from the early 1970s, reflecting the artist’s intellectual engagement with the contemporary changes of science and technology of that time, along with a film and documentation of his work in this medium.

London-born artist Roy Colmer (1935–2014) was a painter, photographer, graphic designer and film artist. Through the use of painting, film, photography and collage, inspired by the introduction of new, electronic media that dominated the artistic landscape of the 1970s, Colmer challenged the disciplinary boundaries in which he worked. His incorporation of time-based technologies with paint and canvas – which other artists at the time found too conventional – mark Colmer as a true innovator in his field.

Roy Colmer began painting in the mid-1960s after graduating from Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, where he was taught under the tutelage of Almir Mavignier, Eduardo Paolozzi and Georg Gresko. Colmer’s signature approach, characterised by his use of a spray gun, brought about a nuanced language of painting, allowing him to create filmic effects that evoke the sensation of vibration, movement and distortion. Reminiscent of early TV sets flickering to life, the paintings on display as part of the exhibition – all from the early 1970s and rarely exhibited before – display an optical haze of colour built around horizontal stripes and pulsating lozenge-like, organic forms. These works particularly demonstrate Colmer’s ongoing experimentation with technique and style, progressing to include multi-forms and waves created against a background of shifting colours. Lines bend and gyrate, taking on an almost figurative quality, as sections of these misty, tonal canvasses take on shadowy contours. As Alex Bacon identified in an exhibition catalogue that accompanied Roy Colmer’s first exhibition with Lisson in January this year, “It was a true innovation of Colmer’s to jerry-rig his spray gun to be able to change colours in the course of a single pass across the canvas.”

In the 1970s, around the same time Roy Colmer was producing spray-paintings, he began working with closed circuit television, exploring the effects of video feedback and interference in this new medium. The television thus became his spray gun. Toying with the stream of electrons that are blasted against a TV screen, like the play between spray-gun, paint and canvas, Roy Colmer’s video works continued to embody his painterly style, the changing, undulating patterns similar to those found in his paintings. The work featured as part of this exhibition, Metamorphosis (1974), realises the dance-like movement Roy Colmer wanted to convey in his films in direct response to the movement expressed in abstract expressionist paintings. Black-and-white figures transform into amorphous abstractions; their colourful forms, mixed with intermittent flashes of light and static, similar to the imagery generated by heat-sensing body cameras. Rare, archival photographs documenting Roy Colmer’s process behind the creation of his films accompany the exhibition, providing unique access into this area of the artist’s practice.

ROY COLMER: BIOGRAPHY

Known primarily for his conceptual photography, film projects and colour-intensive paintings, Roy Colmer challenged the boundaries between these disciplines in order to develop a new kind of perception. Inspired by the shifting artistic cultural landscape brought about through the introduction of electronic media, Colmer connected the surfaces of his paintings to video through the use of spray techniques and a careful selection of colour, suggesting filmic effects such as movement, flicker, distortion, and as Colmer described, “feedback.” He was interested in the immediacy and versatility of the spray gesture and the ability to manipulate space and depth through colour and form, notions influenced by his Concretist mentors at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. By the early 1970s, Colmer began to incorporate this telegenic feedback directly into his practice, increasingly working in video and film. His exploration and manipulation of electronic signals was part of a larger group of artists working in the area at the time, among them Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman. Colmer stopped experimenting with paint entirely a few years later and focused his attention on photography and documentary projects.

Roy Colmer was born in London in 1935. Aged twenty, he was conscripted into the British Army and was stationed in Germany. After leaving the military, he studied painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg on a full scholarship, where he was taught by professors Almir Mavignier, Eduardo Paolozzi and Georg Gresko. As a student he began a lifelong friendship with Hanne Darboven that resulted in several collaborations. In 1966 he moved to New York where he continued his painting practice and began to experiment with film and photography. From November 1975 to September 1976, Colmer photographed more than 3000 doors, inclusive and in sequence, on 120 intersections and streets of Manhattan from Wall Street to Fort Washington. The project, titled Doors, NYC, became his seminal work, and the New York Public Library acquired a full edition for its archives in 2005. Colmer taught photography at the New School in New York from 1987 to 1995. His paintings and video feedback works were included in ‘High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1966-1975,’ a touring exhibition organised and circulated by Independent Curators International from 2006 to 2008. His work Doors, NYC was incorporated in Darboven’s work Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983), 1980–83, and in 2015, it was exhibited as part of ‘Greater New York’ at MoMA PS1, New York, and in ‘175 Years of Sharing Photography,’ an exhibition from the collection of the New York Public Library. Colmer was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988 and received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art in 1990. The artist died in 2014 in Los Angeles.

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Stanley Whitney @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Stanley Whitney: Drawings
Lisson Gallery, New York
8 September – 21 October 2017

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York is the first major presentation of his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Stanley Whitney’s works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Stanley Whitney’s signature format revolves around his use of a loose grid and it is within his sketchbooks and drawings that Whitney works through the abstract structure of colored blocks and lines, testing combinations, arrangements, density and transparency of colors to evoke a sense of rhythm and cadence. Whitney has noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.” (*)

In Stanley Whitney’s work, color functions as both the design, creating shape and arrangement, and also as the energy, simultaneously attracting and distracting from the color laid beside it. The colors are meant to be seen next to and in relation to the others, rather than as individual blocks. While the drawings and paintings share the importance of space and sequencing of hue — and the gesture of the paintings maintain a sketching quality with the deliberate presence of the artist’s hand — the works on paper do not adhere to a square format as the paintings do. Instead, they tend to fill the rectangular page. Thus, by their format alone the drawings allow for an entirely fresh approach to the grid and pose a different challenge to creating the desired ‘call and response’ between colors. They incorporate a wider variety of color and texture — Whitney uses mediums including colored pencil, graphite, acrylic marker and crayon on surfaces as varied as Indian paper, Japanese rice papers and cardboard.

In his early drawings Whitney experiments with space in a freer format, with marks that are gestural and loose and the areas of color or space between horizontals are sparse and circular. Following a visit to Italy and Egypt in the early 1990s, he begins to experiment with the density of the color within the structure, as inspired by the classical and ancient architecture of the regions. Building these blocks of color, stacked on top of one another across the horizontal lines, the structure becomes more organized and the grids more precise and angular over the following decades.

To accompany the exhibition, the gallery has published a facsimile of one of Whitney’s sketchbooks, illustrating his working process and the way in which he orchestrates shape and color.   

(*) Stanley Whitney, “Stanley Whitney in conversation with Lowery Stokes Sims,” Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2015), 60.

STANLEY WHITNEY

Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Having developed his unique grid format in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Whitney’s work evokes a constant rhythm and profound lyricism deeply inspired by music, and drawing influences from sources as vast as Egyptian architecture and Italian cityscapes to textiles and the Gee’s Bend Quilts. Whitney's works featured in a major solo exhibition ‘Dance the Orange’, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA (2015), and he has been included in many prominent group shows such as Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017), ‘Nero su Bianco’ at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); ‘Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract’, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, USA (2014); ‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’, Cheim & Read, New York (2013) and ‘Utopia Station’ at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. Whitney was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in May 2017. Whitney’s work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. This marks his third exhibition at Lisson Gallery, and his first in the New York location. 

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