Lisson Gallery at TEFAF New York 2026
14 April 2026
Lisson Gallery is pleased to return to TEFAF New York with a dual-artist presentation that brings together two of the most influential figures in contemporary art: Tony Cragg and Sean Scully. Spanning sculpture and painting, the presentation foregrounds new and recent works that explore the expressive potential of material, structure, and abstraction, while reflecting each artist’s decades-long commitment to rethinking the language of form.
Born in Liverpool in 1949 and based in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977, Tony Cragg has continually expanded the possibilities of sculpture through an open-ended engagement with materials and processes. His early stacked works and floor-based arrangements established a taxonomical approach to the world, where manmade objects function as “fossilized keys” to our present moment. These investigations blurred distinctions between natural and constructed environments, laying the foundation for a practice that examines how material form shapes human perception and emotion.
The presentation centers on two works from Cragg’s Incident series, one realized in Corten steel and the other in polished stainless steel, each articulating the series’ signature upright, anthropomorphic form. Through a rigorous process of carving and construction, these sculptures dissolve boundaries between interior and exterior, mass and void. While the Corten work emphasizes material density and a grounded, matte presence, the stainless-steel counterpart activates the surface through shifting reflections, heightening a sense of movement and optical fluidity.
In dialogue, Sean Scully presents two new paintings from his Wall of Light series—one on canvas and one on copper—alongside a beautiful new Landline work entitled, La Mer (2026). Born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in London, Scully moved to New York in 1975, where he played a pivotal role in shifting American abstraction beyond the reduced vocabulary of Minimalism toward a more emotional and natural mode. Drawing on a wide range of influences, his work synthesizes transatlantic traditions into a visual language that is both structured and deeply expressive.
Inspired by the interplay of light and shadow on ancient architecture, the Wall of Light paintings translate memory into layered compositions of color, texture, and geometry, while in the Landline series Scully transforms his experience of the Irish seascape into stacked, gestural bands of color that distill layered perceptions of landscape into a sublime meditation on memory, emotion, and place; together, these works retain a notable intimacy, with shifting tonal relationships that evoke emotional and narrative depth and reflect his sustained engagement with abstraction as a vehicle for spirituality, experience, and the human condition.
Together, Cragg and Scully articulate parallel investigations into structure and sensation—one through the physical articulation of material, the other through the optical and emotional resonance of color and form. This dual presentation at TEFAF New York 2026 offers a rare opportunity to encounter two landmark practices in conversation, each grounded in a rich personal history yet continually evolving in response to the world around us.
