Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in TEFAF New York 2025, with a presentation featuring historic and recent works by a selection of artists from its roster. Spanning painting, sculpture, and photography, the gallery’s booth highlights dialogues between materiality, identity, and abstraction through works by Dalton Paula, Carmen Herrera, Sean Scully, Olga de Amaral, Leiko Ikemura, Anish Kapoor, and Tony Bechara, alongside Kelly Akashi, Otobong Nkanga, and Hélio Oiticica.
Dalton Paula’s Zacimba Gaba (2025), an oil and gold leaf portrait, anchors the booth and marks the artist’s debut with the gallery. This presentation precedes Paula’s upcoming, inaugural, solo exhibition in New York this September. Through a practice rooted in archival research and symbolic storytelling, Paula constructs a visual language that reclaims Black histories and identities in Brazil and the wider African diaspora. The regal presence of Zacimba Gaba, a historical figure of resistance, is rendered with luminous gold detailing and the artist’s signature saturated blue background—referencing vernacular portrait traditions of northeastern Brazil.
Another prominent work on view, is Carmen Herrera’s work on paper, Untitled (2018). This presentation coincides with the gallery’s solo exhibition in New York, Carmen Herrera: The Paris Years, 1948 –1953, which examines the artist deep in experimentation, subsuming the seismic influences of many colliding midcentury art movements, in order to develop her own breakthrough language of painting. The exhibition is also the most comprehensive presentation of her work from this period to-date.
Read moreSean Scully, whose solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum opens May 11th, presents Wall Tappan Deep Red (2025), an oil on copper work that continues his lifelong exploration of rhythm, structure, and the emotive potential of color. Olga de Amaral’s Tierra y fibra 3 (1988) is a landmark textile work combining wool and dyed horsehair. Part of a foundational series exploring light, fiber, and pattern, the piece is an early example of the artist’s innovations in dimensional weaving—where the structure of the weave itself refracts light and shadow in dynamic interplay.
Leiko Ikemura’s bronze sculpture, Usagi double-headed Hoshi (2018/23) will also be displayed. The Usagi, a recurring motif in the artist’s practice, is a hybrid rabbit-human figure born from the trauma of the 2011 Tōhoku disaster, symbolizing spiritual protection, resilience, and renewal. This Janus-faced, bodhisattva-like being embodies ambiguity and compassion, serving as a cosmic shelter and a conduit between worlds. Ikemura’s inaugural exhibition, Talking to the sky, seeking light with Lisson Gallery is on view in New York through August 1st.
The gallery will also present a new painting by Tony Bechara, Untitled (2025). This work embodies the artist’s signature approach, blending structure with spontaneity and striking a balance between randomness and strict order. The canvas, fully saturated with color, removes any sense of spatial depth and emphasizes the intricate interplay of hues. One color seems to move forward while another retreats, creating a dynamic sense of conflicting space.
Elsewhere on the booth, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Opticks 050 (2018) reflects the artist’s photographic investigations into light and color. Using prisms to dissect white light into its spectral components, Sugimoto offers a minimalist yet alchemical take on photography as a scientific and philosophical medium. Anish Kapoor’s Cobalt Blue to Clear Satin (2025) brings the viewer into a meditative encounter with perception. This recent stainless steel work expands Kapoor’s iconic mirrored forms into a sublime color gradient that shifts between saturation and reflection.
Further sculptural highlights include Kelly Akashi’s Be Me (A Thousand Flowers) (2021), a bronze and glass assemblage set atop a walnut pedestal. On view ahead of Akashi’s upcoming residency at the Pinchuk Foundation and following her recent Los Angeles solo show, the work exemplifies the artist’s exploration of transformation, permanence, and personal lineage. Otobong Nkanga’s Silent Anchor V (2024) continues her poetic engagement with ecology, healing, and the spiritual. Running concurrently with her solo exhibition Each Seed a Body at the Nasher Sculpture Center (on view through August 2025) and her large-scale installation at MoMA, this intricate arrangement of rope, glass, ceramic, and blue chamomile oil suggests a network of invisible energies and rituals of care.
Additionally, Hélio Oiticica is represented by a rare early geometric abstraction from 1955, Untitled (Grupo Frente), and precedes the late artist’s fall exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles. The work reflects Oiticica’s formative contributions to Brazilian modernism and signals the conceptual and chromatic experimentation that would define his later practice.
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