Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor
Lisson Gallery

Kapoor's paintings are both beautiful and ugly - like our body! Visceral and vaginal as if a phenomenological body is carving a wall from the inside. A pretentious voluptuous copy on Adriana Varejão' exploration on themes of colonialism, miscegenation and anthropology, but without Varejão sensual forms.

Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan
Lisson Gallery

Lee Ufan, Relatum - Rest (gravel, glass, steel, stone), 2013

Quite, simple, neat, loose strokes with some traces of wilderness; Browns, Oranges, Greens, Grays, and Blues at the same time with great levels of concentration and energy.

Lee Ufan, Dialogue (watercolour, paper), 2014

Lee Ufan, Dialogue - Silence (virgin canvas, stone), 2013

Lee Ufan, Dialogue (oil on canvas), 2014

Lee Ufan, Dialogue (oil on canvas), 2014 [Detail]

Cross Section of a Revolution

Cross Section of a Revolution
Allora & Calzadilla, Broomberg & Chanarin, Liu Xiaodong, Haroon Mirza, Rashid Rana, Wael Shawky, Santiago Sierra
Lisson Gallery

Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet, 2008 [detail]

«This group exhibition of Lisson Gallery artists explores global aspects of trade, trauma, religious belief systems and contested territories, via a number of intersecting political practices, across photographic, sculptural, painterly and filmic media.» [...MORE...]

Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet, 2008

Allora and Calzadilla, The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy, 2013

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Divine Violence, 2013

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: The Gates of the Festival

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
The Gates of the Festival
Lisson Gallery

Life is made of curves, not of straight lines. When in the curves we hear life's sound and we see nature's colours.

Marina Abramović: White Space

Marina Abramović
White Space
Lisson Gallery

Getting into Marina's works...

Joyce Pensato: Joyceland

Joyce Pensato
Joyceland
Lisson Gallery

When I was a teenager I done a couple of creative things, including being in a band - “al most fin ish”- and doing some arty things on the visual arts fork - damn autocorrect -, such as combining photography and painting: drawing lines of colour over black and white photos of naked people (you can go and see the final result at a local restaurant near my parents’ home place). Anyway, moving on to the spicy things. Now that I’m at Joyceland, at Lisson Gallery, one of the first things that occurs to me is to paint (drippings) a metal “thing” that we used back in the old days to weight dead pigs. After we have killed him, and before doing the sausage, we use to weight the dead pig on the side of the house main gate so all the village will knew it. And used this “thing” to weight the beast. Good old days! I painted it together with a metal chandelier and a … with golden, purple, silver and green colours. Somewhere in between, I’ve also painted a couple of naked female bodies with my sweat, swear and seamen. Tonight, the only thing that I’m “painting” are these words on my iPhone. Life, back then, was much much more accessible. I simply didn’t care about conventions and norms, and lived it as I took it. Joyce Pensato, or Joyceland, as she calls her world, is a clear example of an artist that is totally about affect. People are wrong when they go and look for meaning (Afro-american and racism, Mickey Mouse an sexuality, etc.) when her work is about sensation. They are layers ad layers of sensation, not meaning. Those are a secondary outcome, results from a personal expression. She's sharing!

«Joyce Pensato paints exuberant, explosive large-scale likenesses of cartoon characters and comic-book heroes. Her seemingly frenzied technique – actually involving the deliberate accretion of successive layers of bold linear gestures, rapid spattering and frequent erasures – results in alternately humorous and sinister imagery. While her prima facie subject matter ranges from Batman, The Simpsons and Mickey Mouse to Felix the Cat and Elmo from Sesame Street, her artistic progenitors include Alberto Giacometti, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Philip Guston.» [...MORE...]

«Joyce Pensato was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to live and work. Her touring solo show, I Killed Kenny, first shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2013) is now travelling to the Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis (24 January-13 April 2014). Solo exhibitions include Santa Monica Museum of Art (2013); Petzel Gallery (2012, 2008, 2007) Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2012) and Galerie Anne de Villepoix (2010, 2000, 1998). Recent group exhibitions include Empire State, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Sir Norman Rosenthal at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2013); Interior Visions: Selections from the Collection by Alex Katz at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville (2012); A Painting Show at The Speed Museum of Art, Louisville (2011) and The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000). Pensato’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; St Louis Art Museum and the FRAC des Pays de la Loire. She has won numerous awards including the Robert de Niro, Sr. Prize (2013), the Award of Merit Medal for Painting, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (1997) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996).»

Christian Jankowski: Heavy Weight History

Christian Jankowski
Heavy Weight History
Lisson Gallery

PRESS RELEASE:

Last year the German artist Christian Jankowski travelled to Poland to produce Heavy Weight History, which consists of an installation, a 25-minute film and a series of photographs. Jankowski invited a group of burly weightlifters to try and pick up a number of massive public sculptures in the Polish capital of Warsaw, including more than one Communist-era memorial, a statue of Ronald Reagan and the figure of Syrenka the Mermaid, a famous, often vandalised symbol of the city, first erected in 1859. Wearing their national colours, the Polish champion powerlifters and bench-pressers struggle and strain to elevate these hefty bronze and brick monuments, metaphorically attempting to lift the very burden of history on to their shoulders.

Simultaneously disturbing and stimulating debates surrounding the still-raw history of Polish occupation by the Nazis, as well as the country’s protracted period of Soviet rule after WWII, Jankowski’s film conversely posits a light-hearted and socially-inclusive aspect to his controversial undertaking – that of reinvigorating locals’ relationships to oft-neglected bits of Varsovian public statuary. This questioning of the continued relevance and future siting of public sculpture continues a line of enquiry by Jankowski that has previously seen him create numerous life-size bronze Living Statues (2007) – simulacra of street performers posing as Julius Caesar and Che Guevara in Barcelona – as well as a giant socialist-realist sculpture based on an anachronistically luxurious photograph by one of the Mexican Muralists, entitled Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class (2012).

As with other films of Jankowski’s, such as Casting Jesus of 2011, the live, performative elements of Heavy Weight History have been documented in the style of scripted reality television, or specifically in this case as a convincing piece of outside broadcast coverage of a competitive sport, with a well-known Polish commentator on hand to describe the action. For his fourth solo show with Lisson Gallery in ten years, Jankowski is also presenting another recent film, Crying for the March of Humanity of 2012, in which an entire episode of a Mexican telenovela has been remade, except that the lines of dialogue have been replaced by actors sobbing and crying rather than speaking – extending the dramatic, climactic soap opera moment into something more like hysteria. Photo-realistic canvases from The China Painters series (2007-08), produced by copyists from the notorious ‘oil painting village’ of Dafen, complete Jankowski’s exhibition, while similarly highlighting the potentially serious ramifications of staging or altering reality, whether that manipulation happens through translation via mass-media or as a by-product of an inherent flaw in man’s nature.

[...MORE...]

André Romão exhibition, The Winter of (our) Discontent, in 2010, at Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon), deals with the imposition of political ideologies throughout history in the public space.

Tatsou Miyajima: I-Model

Tatsou Miyajima
I-Model
Lisson Gallery

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 18, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 15, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 18, 2013 (Detail)

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 17, 2013

«The show’s title, I-Model, refers to Miyajima’s collaboration with an artificial life expert, Professor Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University, which has resulted in a computer programme that generates number sequences responding to the rhythms and speeds of others in the system. Instead of a collection of randomised counting circuits, these networks or clusters of flashing digits come together to create intelligent, ‘living’ organisms, which Miyajima calls Corps Sans Organe after Antonin Artaud’s term for an ideal, virtual body that could function independently from the interconnectivity of its constituent parts.

The Rhizome series (all works 2013), are similarly complex and hypnotic works, formed of glittering grids or panels of coloured LED numbers, also following Ikegami’s unpredictable logic processors. Lisson Gallery is also debuting Miyajima’s seductively red leather-clad structure, Life Palace (Tea House) (2013), which occupies an entire gallery and invites one viewer at a time to step into a domed constellation of blue lights, with numbers glowing and blinking in the darkened space. This personal, meditative isolation chamber reinforces Miyajima’s Buddhist-infused philosophies about time and contemplation, reflecting the cycle of life through the progression from 1 to 9.» [PR]

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (rhizome) No. 1?, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (rhizome) No. 1?, 2013 (detail)

«Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Miyajima’s technological works centre on his use of digital counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious – though not necessarily sequential – cycles, represent the journey from life to death and derive from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with All’, and ‘Goes on Forever’. Selected solo shows include: SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo (2012, 2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011); Lokremise / Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (2011); Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido (2010); Lisson Gallery, London (2009, 2005).» [PR]

Li Xiaodong: Half Street

Li Xiaodong
Half Street
Lisson Gallery

Li Xiaodong, Egyptian Restaurant 8 (acrylic on paint, 40.5x50.5 cm), 2013 (detail)

Li Xiaodong's exhibition view

Li Xiaodong's exhibition view

Li Xiaodong's Diary 2013

«Liu Xiaodong (1963) is one of China’s foremost artists and a painter of international stature. Born in 1963 to factory worker parents in Jincheng, a town in northeastern China, he trained at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts where he now teaches as a professor. A pioneer of neo-realism, his work was integral in the transformation of Chinese contemporary art during the 1990s, radically diverging from the Socialist Realism that dominated artistic production during the Mao era. Politically and socially aware, Liu explores the human experience through his art, while expanding the possibilities of painting. Recent solo shows include: Today Art Museum, Beijing (2013); Kunsthaus Graz (2012); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2006) and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2006).» [PR]

Fusiform Gyrus