Image: Ceal Floyer
Ceal Floyer 23 November 2010 – 29 January 2011
52-54 Bell Street
Carmen Herrera and Peter Joseph 23 November 2010 – 29 January 2011
29 Bell Street
Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Ceal Floyer in 52-54 Bell Street and Carmen Herrera and Peter Joseph in 29 Bell Street.
Ceal Floyer’s clarity of thought and the elegantly concise presentation of her ideas resonate through all areas of her practice. The deceptive simplicity of the work is informed by Floyer’s particular sense of humour and an awareness of the absurd. Through subtle interventions with everyday objects such as rubbish bags filled with air, cash register receipts or a Tammy Wynette song, Floyer uses double-takes and shifting points of view to force the viewer to renegotiate their perception of the world.
Alongside new works the show at Lisson provides a chance to see a reconfiguration of ‘Things’, first shown at KW Institute for Contemporary Arts, Berlin, in 2009. A cluster of plinths stand in an empty room each emitting at different intervals in real time the word “things”, the only audible section from otherwise silenced pop songs. However, apart from the plinths themselves, no ‘things’ are present in the room. Instead the work focuses attention on the space allotted to art, and on the awareness of possibility in production.
Striking in its formal simplicity, precise linear quality and geometric distillations of colour, Carmen Herrera’s work has only recently come to the attention of art historians and collectors. At the age of 95, she is finally recognised as a pioneer of geometric abstraction and Latin American Modernism, with her paintings joining the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Walker Art Center, El Museo del Barrio in New York and the Tate Modern.
Born in Havana in 1915, Carmen Herrera has lived in Paris, Cuba and New York, where she eventually settled in 1954. A contemporary and friend to Barnett Newman, Leon Polk Smith, and Wifredo Lam, it was only six years ago, at the age of 89, that she sold her first art work. Her show at Lisson focuses on paintings created in the 1980’s and 1990’s and follows Ikon Gallery’s landmark 2009 solo show, the first of its kind in Europe and one of only a handful of exhibitions to have featured the artist in a career spanning over six decades
Born 1929, in London, England, Peter Joseph is the only artist to have continually shown with Lisson Gallery since it foundation in the 1960s. Known for his two-colour, tonal canvases of precise, carefully considered hues Joseph’s work historically his work exists within self-imposed, specific structures and parameters – the effect being one of unlimited freedom confined within the parameters of a framed construct.
In recent decades Joseph’s work has displayed a shift towards compositional improvisation, creating a new sense of freedom that exists outside of the geometry or ‘architecture’ of his earlier work. Intrinsically ‘experiential’ they emphasise a time-based sensibility and through the tonality of his colours evoke a sense of melody and rhythmic harmony.
