Lisson Gallery’s opening exhibition in April 1967 was a group show of five young artists. Among them were figures who would be part of Britain’s cultural avant-garde in the 1970s and 1980s, including the future filmmaker Derek Jarman and visual artist Keith Milow, the latter of whom, according to art historian Jo Melvin, ‘helped to shape and define a critical period of new and experimental art practices in Britain’. Exhibitions in the gallery’s inaugural year—for example, Yoko Ono’s Half-A-Wind Show and a solo show of Taiwanese abstract and conceptual art pioneer Li Yuan-Chia—indicated the international and forward-thinking programme that would come to define the gallery.

In its first two decades Lisson Gallery introduced American artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Ryman to a British audience, while promoting English Conceptual artists such as Richard Long in New York. In the 1980s, the gallery worked with a number of contemporary sculptors who came to be labelled the New British Sculptors, among them Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg.

As its artists grew in reputation—Kapoor and Cragg, among others, claiming the prestigious Turner Prize—Lisson Gallery began expanding: in 1991, it acquired a new space on Bell Street in London (later, in 2002, it would set up shop at another location on the same street); then in 2011 it opened an outpost in Milan; and in 2016 it opened its first New York space, with a second space launching in the city the following year. Today the gallery operates from five permanent exhibition spaces: two in London (one on Bell Street and one on Lisson Street); two in New York (one on West 24^th Street and one on Tenth Avenue); and a fifth in Shanghai.

Situated on Huqiu Road and near several of Shanghai’s major museums and cultural institutions—including Fosun Foundation, Rockbund Art Museum, and Christie’s—Lisson Gallery’s Shanghai location opened to the public on 22 March 2019 with a show entitled Love is Metaphysical Gravity. Taking its title from a quote by the American architect and theorist Buckminster Fuller, the exhibition included works by Marina Abramović, Shirazeh Houshiary, Richard Long, and Tatsuo Miyajima.

Artists represented by Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery exhibits and works with over 60 international artists and estates, spanning the practices of painting, sculpture, performance, and video installation. Among these artists is a roster of big art-world names such as Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong, Abramović, Daniel Buren, Art & Language, Lee Ufan, Sol LeWitt, and Julian Opie. The gallery also represents the estates of prominent 20th century pioneers including John Latham, Roy Colmer, Ted Stamm, and Antonio Calderara.

Alongside these major names, Lisson Gallery brings a younger generation of artists to the international stage, such as Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Haroon Mirza, Ryan Gander, and Laure Prouvost. Gathering together artists from across the globe and collaborating with them in exhibitions, art fairs, and works beyond the gallery space, the gallery continues its pattern of selecting the latest contemporary artists to work with and develop.

What to watch

Lisson Gallery participates in art fairs across the globe, including Frieze London, New York, and Los Angeles; Frieze Masters, London; Art Basel in Miami Beach and Hong Kong; FIAC, Paris; and West Bund Art & Design, Shanghai. Several artists represented by Lisson Gallery feature in the Venice Biennale and its collateral events each edition; in 2019, Laure Prouvost presented her project Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre for the French Pavilion of the 58^th Venice Biennale, while Lisson Gallery also supported John Akomfrah’s three-screen video installation Four Nocturnes for the Ghana Pavilion that year.