Lisson Gallery – förlag

Stacking as sculptural procedure across five decades of Cragg’s art

This career-spanning publication focuses on the history of Tony Cragg’s (born 1949) Stack works that began in the late 1960s, when, as a student, he began piling up miscellaneous and recycled detritus from the studio in order to create large rectilinear sculptures that refuted the usual clean lines of minimalism.

This volume highlights the work of American artist Leon Polk Smith (1906–96), one of the founders of the hard-edge style of minimalist art, who rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his distinctive shaped canvas series. While his minimalist peers were shifting away from modernism, Smith was wholeheartedly advancing the formal and rational elements of the modernist tradition, in particular the legacy of Mondrian. Published for a 2017 exhibition at Lisson Gallery, this book focuses on paintings and drawings from the artist’s seminal Constellation series from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The publication features an essay by the poet and writer John Yau, alongside color reproductions of each of the works included in the exhibition. An illustrated chronology details the artist’s life and work, including previously unpublished archival material.

A longstanding and beloved icon of contemporary painting in New York, Stanley Whitney (born 1946) has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multihued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. Whitney’s works on paper and preparatory sketchbooks are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color. 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.” Sketchbook is a precise facsimile of one of the artist’s Moleskine notebooks, featuring his notes, sketches and color investigations for recent paintings.

Quantifying the emotional burden of everyday life through the use of surveillance cameras and a robotic painting machine

Since 2015, Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong (born 1963) has been developing a technologically radical project to create landscape paintings using robotic arms and surveillance cameras. Collectively entitled Weight of Insomnia, this series of paintings is an attempt to quantify the emotional burden carried by people moving through the seemingly ceaseless surroundings of the 24-hour city. Taking live feeds, streaming data and imagery from specific locations, Liu’s painting machine processes these real-time images of the ever-changing flow of humanity into a complex network of abstract marks on canvas, resulting in a machine-manufactured painting.This book is the first to publish the full extent of this project through its iterations in China, Germany, the UK and Australia. The volume also includes an interview with the artist as well as Liu’s diaries written during the project’s gestation, installation shots and working documents.

An investigation into Stanley Whitney's profound relationship to color and its spatial effects throughout his career

Color inspires and informs the work of New York artist Stanley Whitney (born 1946), whose paintings explore the many possibilities created by the tessellation and juxtaposition of irregular rectangles in varying shades of strength and subtlety. Within the composition of these adjacent nodes—a structure that fluctuates between freedom and constraint, between endless open fields and controlled boundaries—is ultimately a play between complementing and competing areas of color.In the Color investigates Whitney's profound relationship to color and its spatial effects throughout his career. The clothbound publication has been produced in a unique size that exactly matches the scale of Whitney's smallest oil on linen works, and catalogs in full color a number of works from the 1990s to the present that were included in Whitney's fourth exhibition with Lisson Gallery. Art historian and scholar Adrianna Campbell's essay, “The Primacy of Color,” prefaces the publication.

Three-dimensional extensions of the Cuban-born artist's stark, bright abstract paintings

The definitive publication on Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera's (born 1915) Estructura works, this volume contains new works as well as sketches, plans, installation photographs from the exhibition and an essay by the curator of her recent traveling retrospective, Dana Miller.As three-dimensional extensions of the artist's stark, bright abstract paintings, the Estructuras were envisioned by Herrera in an environmental sense, using the surrounding walls as a part of the composition. These irregularly shaped works technically remain her only monochromes; however, Herrera envisions the white of the wall exposed in the negative space of the sculptures and wall pieces as the second color. Herrera began executing the works in 1969 but abandoned them two years later after the death of her carpenter. These works marked an important moment in Herrera’s career, wherein the forms move from drawing to painting and sculpture, and her meticulous sharp edges are physically manifested.

Veteran abstractionist Stanley Whitney explores more intimately scaled canvases in this deluxe slipcased overview of recent works

New York–based painter Stanley Whitney (born 1946) is known for his vivid multicolored abstract paintings, with stacked irregular rectangles of color in a loose grid composition on square-format canvases.In this new slipcased volume, featuring a unique design with 12 gatefolds, Whitney extends his trademark style to a smaller scale. He produces his smaller “afternoon paintings” with the leftover paint after completing a large painting. These works express Whitney’s dedication to the consistency of his painting, which he likens to athletic training or the “wood-shedding” that jazz musicians invoke when describing time spent honing their improvisatory skills behind closed doors.Featuring an introductory essay by writer and critic Lynne Tillman, this book provides an intimate, expressive glimpse into the mind of a master when he is “more relaxed, more loose, more carefree.”

Richard Deacon’s ruminations on the art of sculpture from the Paleolithic to the present

Originally delivered as a lecture by British sculptor Richard Deacon (born 1949), this volume provides a visual chronology and historical survey of sculpture—from Paleolithic hand axes to 3D printers—while revealing some of Deacon’s own ideas on authorship, authenticity and appropriation.

A contemporary history painter addresses the pandemic

Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong (born 1963) has been addressing radical shifts in society such as population displacement and environmental crisis for over three decades. This publication features a series of watercolor paintings that document the changing landscape of New York City during the height of the pandemic.

Recent works by the great exponent of hard-edged architectural abstraction

This publication highlights a selection of works by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera (born 1915) from the past decade. At 105 years old, Herrera has developed her signature geometric style over the course of decades spent in New York City and postwar Paris, as well as her hometown of Havana; however, it was only in the early 2000s that she began to receive acclaim for her work. The origins of her process trace back to her early studies in architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in Cuba from 1938 to 1939. She often credits this training as where she learned to draw and to think abstractly, stating, “I wouldn’t paint the way I do if I hadn’t gone to architecture school.” While Herrera’s process is often characterized by meticulous constraint and distillation of color and shape, it is perhaps best described as a perfect synergy of artistic and scientific creativity.

A concise introduction to the pioneering formal and social innovations of the Neoconcretist and Tropicália protagonist

Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s (1937–80) oeuvre remains an indisputable influence on all aspects of avant-garde culture in his home country and abroad, from visual art to music, theater, literature and beyond. This volume demonstrates the numerous ways in which Oiticica’s work explored and expanded formal artistic modes, pushing past the boundaries of color and structure. Oiticica prioritized the inclusive and participatory possibilities of art, represented through his forays into environmental art and interactive installation. Large-scale projects such as his monumental installation Tropicália (1966–67), which satirizes the idea of Brazil as a tropical paradise, are documented alongside his works on paper and textile pieces. The text traces the evolution of Oiticica’s multidisciplinary practice and underlines the cosmological ideas that guided his approach to art and life, demonstrating the profound impact Oiticica's ideas had on the wider art world, both past and present.

Scully's latest "transcendental portals" for a new interpretation of abstract painting

During 2020, a year rocked by a global pandemic and political unrest, Sean Scully (born 1945) painted two new monumental series of paintings, titled The 12 and Dark Windows. Through essays and an interview, this publication sets out the historical context for these works.

Eclectic spatial interventions from a British conceptualist’s exhibition during lockdown

British artist Ryan Gander’s (born 1976) interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, film and performance. His work juxtaposes the esoteric and the everyday, creating a set of hidden clues to be pieced together by the viewer like a conceptual puzzle.

A half century of hard-edged abstraction: selected works by Polk Smith

While recognized as a forerunner of American hard-edge painting, whose innovative abstractions of the 1950s were highly influential, Leon Polk Smith (1906–96) often went unappreciated during his lifetime. This publication chronicles the 2021 exhibition at Lisson Gallery, featuring works spanning nearly 50 years of his career, from his struggle with the legacy of Mondrian to his impact on the language of abstraction and his acknowledgment, later in life, of the influence on his art of the rural prairies of Oklahoma, where he grew up, and the importance of his Cherokee heritage.This fully illustrated catalog features new scholarship by curator and editor Lynn Zelevanksy and art historian Elizabeth Buhe, and a reproduction of a 1968 essay by the legendary critic Lawrence Alloway. Representing three generations, their diverse perspectives provide a rich and complex discussion og the artist’s legacy, and unprecedented insight into his career.

A poetic and abstract exploration of consciousness and perception

New York-based artist Joanna Pousette-Dart (born 1947) presents a selection of recent abstract paintings rendered with vivid colors and in her signature format of multipanel curvilinear canvases with beveled edges, at once evoking the curvature of the earth and one’s field of vision.

Surveying over five decades of shimmering, gold leaf-coated tapestries from an underappreciated master of textile art

Colombian artist Olga de Amaral (born 1932) makes large-scale textiles and woven walls of fabric that incorporate the use of gold and silver leaf, evoking gilded churches and byzantine mosaics. This volume accompanies her inaugural exhibition at Lisson Gallery, showcasing a selection of her works since the 1960s.

Taking a famous Rubens painting as his starting point, Thompson applies conceptual rigor and algorithmic play to his painted and printed reproductions

Conceptual painter Cheyney Thompson’s (born 1975) practice centers on the mechanical reproduction of art, whether repainting a Rubens fresco or creating a digital data set of drawings inspired by Cézanne’s sketches of the same Rubens work.

Whether life-sized or small-scale, Xiaodong’s paintings document the people of the Shaanbei region with both realism and pathos

Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong’s (born 1963) most personally significant project to date, Shaanbei is his series on the eponymous Chinese province and birthplace of the People’s Republic of China, which Xiaodong frequented as an art student and which he revisited to paint in 2018.

Sean Scully returns to Los Angeles 50 years after his US exhibition debut

Newspaper clippings, photographs and more accompany a look back on 50 years of colorful geometrical paintings from Irish-born artist Sean Scully (born 1945). The career-spanning publication reveals formal and conceptual resonances between his earliest grid paintings and his equally innovative recent large-scale works.

Inspired by the iconic Symbolist series by Arnold Böcklin, Yu Hong creates contemporary mournful islands of her own

Chinese painter Yu Hong (born 1966) constructs modern-day fables and complex, allegorical compositions that channel historical, narrative-driven art as seen through a fiercely contemporary lens. Her newest series is inspired by the elegiac funeral depicted in Island of the Dead (1880–1901), the most famous work of Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901). Each painting by Yu features figures on a solitary island beset by crashing waves. Each entry represents a different emotion, underpinned by dread, until the viewer is able to, in Böcklin’s words, "dream into the world of dark shadows." This body of work expands on the large, dramatic scenes Yu exhibited as part of Another One Bites the Dust, her first major solo exhibition that occurred during the Venice Biennale, characterized by their grandiose, often grotesque depictions of contemporary social anxieties.

A sleek, minimalist and all-encompassing monograph on Peter Joseph and his experiments in geometric abstraction

From his large-scale environmental works of the 1960s to his two-color compositions of the 1970s, British painter Peter Joseph (1929–2020) developed his theory of color and proportion from his close study of Old Masters, classical architecture and American Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Inside Bechara’s thought process for his meticulously planned and painted colorful geometric grids

Published with Tony Bechara.Puerto Rico–born, New York–based artist Tony Bechara (born 1942) served as board president of El Museo del Barrio for 15 years, while also honing his own geometric abstraction process. Dividing his canvas into hundreds of quarter-inch squares, Bechara meticulously fills each space in with complementary colors. The resulting grid paintings thus evoke a variety of cultural influences: from Seurat’s pioneering pointillism to hard-edge abstraction, traditional weaving and 8-bit "pixel art" of the last half century. In keeping with Bechara’s richly chromatic oeuvre, this artist’s book is inspired by Bechara’s notes and color formulas that form the basis for his acrylic paintings. It features over 130 illustrations, with foldouts and multiple materials, as well as a glossary of key motifs that introduces Bechara’s personal artistic language to the public for the first time.

Painter, sculptor, writer and philosopher Lee Ufan (born 1936) first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the major proponents of the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha. Japan's first contemporary art movement to gain international recognition, the Mono-ha school of thought rejected Western notions of representation, choosing to focus on the relationships of materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention.A new edition of a collection of writings first published in 2004, this volume features previously unpublished essays from 1967 to 2007 and a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. This edition has been published by Lisson Gallery and the Serpentine Galleries on the occasion of Lee Ufan’s 2018 outdoor commission Relatum-Stage at Serpentine Galleries, London.

This volume features a series of abstractions created over the past two years by British abstract painter and president of the Royal Academy of the Arts, Christopher Le Brun (born 1951). Some of these large-scale paintings are light in touch, while others involve dense accretions of color and gesture.

Nkanga’s poetry and drawings, further facets to her multidisciplinary practice, continue her exploration of humanity’s relationship to the land

Following her monumental atrium commission for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stitched Dreams looks at 30 years of drawing, painting and poetry by Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga. Created concurrently with her larger installations, tapestries and performances, the drawings underpin the manifold forms of her creative output and continue her use of bright, natural colors, while her poems have been set down on everything from fired clay tablets to textiles.Delving into the artist’s ritualistic practice of mind-mapping, readers are invited to explore the cultural and historical references that inflect Nkanga’s interest in legacies of empire, the earth's natural resources, the weight of memory and the human imagination’s possibility to conjure social change. The title, Stitched Dreams, comes from the name of her first drawing, made in 1994.Otobong Nkanga (born 1974) grew up in Lagos and Paris and is currently based in Antwerp. She studied fine and performing arts at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife-Ife, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and DasArts in Amsterdam. Nkanga received the Special Mention Award at the 58th Venice Biennale.