Lisson Gallery at Frieze Seoul 2025

28 July 2025

Lisson Gallery returns to Seoul for the fourth edition of Frieze at COEX. The gallery’s presentation highlights a selection of new and recent works by the artists in its programme, including Olga de Amaral, Leiko Ikemura, Oliver Lee Jackson, Sarah Cunningham, Anish Kapoor, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Among the highlights of Lisson’s Seoul presentation are new painting works by Oliver Lee Jackson, whose creations open up spaces for contemplation and interpretation, as well as encounters with seen and unseen worlds. Following his debut solo show at Lisson Gallery London (4 April – 17 May 2025), Jackson displays Painting No. 4, 2022 (5.8.22), depicting energetic fields of abstract marks that occasionally coalesce into floating forms approaching figuration. Jackson showcases Untitled Painting (6.6.25) (2025) and Untitled Painting (6.28.25) (2025), works composed of oil paints and applied felt on tinted panels.

Following the artist’s inaugural exhibition Talk to the sky, seeking light at Lisson New York (1 May – 1 August 2025), Leiko Ikemura shows Brave Girl in Pink (2022), a tempera and oil on nettle work. At once powerful and confrontational, but also vulnerable and naive, Ikemura finds a subtler path between these extremes for her fearsome adolescents, the pigments soaking through and infusing the raw jute canvas with their glowing, glowering presence. Ikemura also displays patinated bronze work Aware (2017/2024), which explores themes of transition, cross-culturalism, collective responsibility, and sexuality.

Olga de Amaral presents Tabla 18 (1993/2011), featuring vivid blue and luminous precious metals, which highlights her homeland’s natural landscapes as well as its art history, with references to both colonial and indigenous art. These textile constructions assume an architectural quality, as scale, surface, light, and movement weave together to create works that are both monumental and intimate. Amaral’s major retrospective is currently on view at ICA Miami in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain until 12 October 2025.

Lisson Gallery’s booth showcases Sarah Cunningham, who sought out the essential and the alive through her imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes. Cunningham’s oil on canvas works, The Wake (2024) and Painting 32 (2024), showcase complex spatial structures through gestural marks, in a process of continual obliteration and overpainting, until hidden worlds and pastures appeared.

Alongside this, Anish Kapoor shows a stainless steel, lacquered work entitled Burple (2022), which subtly fades across shades of blue and deep purple, creating a lyrical oscillation of colour that further emphasises or distorts the formal structure of the object and its reflection.

Elsewhere on the booth, Hiroshi Sugimoto presents Opticks 061 (2018), which utilizes a prism to split ‘white’ light into its seven constituent colors and many more gradations and shades in between. Through the revelation of this hidden, polychromatic world that exists all around us, Sugimoto simultaneously creates stunning, abstract compositions worthy of modernist painting, despite each image depicting an entirely natural phenomenon.

Nearby, Julian Opie’s Busan 2. (2024) and Busan 4. (2024) play with ways of seeing through reinterpreting the vocabulary of everyday life; his reductive style evokes both a visual and spatial experience of the world around us.

Shown here: Leiko Ikemura, Aware, 2017/2024, Patinated bronze, 30 x 22 x 21 cm, 11 3/4 x 8 5/8 x 8 1/4 in © Leiko Ikemura, Courtesy Lisson Gallery