Lisson Gallery was founded in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail. It was one of a small number of pioneering galleries in the UK, Europe and the United States to champion a generation of artists who were transforming the way art was made and presented, focusing on the idea or concept behind an artwork over expressive or descriptive aims. These young artists – including Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold,
Dan Graham,
Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, John Latham, Peter Joseph, Lee Ufan, Giulio Paolini, Daniel Buren - represented not a style but an attitude, an ethos concerning art's place in a wider intellectual, cultural and social context.
Over the past forty years Lisson Gallery has built on this foundation, identifying and supporting succeeding generations of artists, each with a radical and distinctive approach to the artistic possibilities of their times. The New British Sculptors who came to maturity in the early 1980s –
Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor,
Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth and Bill Woodrow – engaged imaginatively with the sculptural object within a conceptual framework. In the 1990s, a more diverse group demonstrated a poetic conceptualism of image and language – Rodney Graham, Douglas Gordon, Ceal Floyer, Jonathan Monk, Christine Borland,
Tatsuo Miyajima and Francis Alÿs – while other artists including Tony Oursler and Jane & Louise Wilson used the media of video and sound to create heightened visions of the social constructs of their age. A new generation has emerged in the first decade of 21st century – Gerard Byrne, Santiago Sierra, Allora & Calzadilla, Fernando
