Lisson Gallery at ART021 BEIJING 2025
21 May 2025
Lisson Gallery is delighted to participate in the 2025 edition of ART021 BEIJING. Lisson’s presentation highlights a selection of works by the gallery’s artists, including Christopher Le Brun, Anish Kapoor, Julian Opie, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yu Hong and Zhao Gang.
Yu Hong’s Glow (2023) offers a nuanced exploration of corporeal expressiveness through a focused study of the human hand. The composition features two upraised hands rendered in meticulous detail, suspended in a gesture that ambiguously evokes both supplication and self-defense. Executed with delicate brushwork and characterised by a warm, textured surface, the painting articulates a restrained yet palpable psychological intensity. Unlike Yu’s characteristic large-scale narrative tableaux, this intimate format underscores her ability to encapsulate complex affective states within a reduced compositional scope, affirming her technical precision and sensitivity to embodied gesture.
A large-scale painting, An Afternoon in February (2023), by Zhao Gang adopts the formal conventions of classical still life while inflecting them with contemporary narrative strategies to examine the entanglement of cultural identity and consumer aesthetics. Serving as a visual diary of quotidian life in contemporary Beijing, the composition features a prominently scaled floral arrangement, recalling the opulence and symbolic charge of Old Master painting, while simultaneously critiquing the commodification of beauty, desire, and domesticity. Zhao’s solo exhibition is currently on view at the TAG Art Museum, Qingdao.
On the occasion of their solo exhibition at the gallery’s Beijing space, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg present a sculpture from the The Enchanted Garden (2023) series. Crafted in bright blue and adorned with birds,, the organic form recalls Scandinavian folklore and reinforces the artists’ exploration of flora as a symbol of fleeting human emotions—joy, sorrow, desire, and vulnerability. Anish Kapoor’s Prussian Blue To Organic Green And Black (2023) continues the artist’s longstanding exploration of perception, spatial disorientation, and the phenomenology of color. The surface functions simultaneously as an optical field and a sculptural presence, embodying Kapoor’s inquiry into the liminal conditions of form and void, material and immaterial. Here, the mirror transcends mere reflectivity to become a site of painterly abstraction, extending the conceptual parameters of painting and sculpture.
Further highlights include Christopher Le Brun’s Kind (2017), a luminous oil on canvas, reflecting the artist’s pursuit of visual lyricism through abstraction; Richard Long’s Untitled (2010), composed of handprints in white China clay, reaffirming his enduring engagement with elemental materials and performative mark-making; Julian Opie’s portrait Alyssa. (2023), demonstrating his formal investigation into the mechanics of representation and abstraction in his signature aesthetic; and Tasman Sea, Marion Bay (2017), from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seminal Seascape series, which captures the convergence of sea and sky with photographic precision and philosophical rigor.
ART021 BEIJING 2025
Lisson Gallery Booth G38
22 – 25 May 2025
