Lisson Gallery brings Kapoor’s mirror steel to Art Mumbai

Two monumental circles of polished steel anchor Lisson Gallery’s booth at Art Mumbai this November, their mirror finish catching light and turning the viewer’s own gaze back at them. Anish Kapoor’s ‘Purple and Wild Cherry mix to Pagan and Lime Gold mix’ sits at the visual centre of Booth C67, continuing the conversation the artist has pursued across five decades about perception, space and the relationship between object and observer. Where his sculptures stand, the room reorganises itself around them.

The London gallery, which represents Kapoor, has shaped the booth around works that dialogue across medium and geography. Christopher Le Brun’s ‘Light in Avalon’, completed in 2026, moves between structure and hue, its gestural marks and shifting colour echoing the reflective, transformative impulse Kapoor pursues in three dimensions. Leiko Ikemura’s ‘watching the scape’ from 2019 draws on Japanese Shintoism and European Romantic tradition to reveal mythical forms emerging from landscape.

Lisson Gallery’s presentation at Booth C67 gathers artists the London gallery represents across four decades. Christopher Le Brun, whose gestural paintings have been with Lisson since the 1980s, brings colour and mark; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic works from his Opticks series; Ai Weiwei’s Flowers from 2007; and sculptures by Tony Cragg and Pedro Reyes. What holds them together is not style but intellectual commitment: each work investigates how perception itself changes when we look at art. Kapoor’s polished circles do not sit apart from the others; they anchor a conversation about the viewer’s role in what the work becomes.

Nicholas Logsdail founded Lisson Gallery in 1967 in a converted shop on Lisson Street in Marylebone, London, establishing it as a space where artists could develop rigorous conceptual and minimalist practices away from commercial pressure. The gallery moved to Bell Street in 1975 and expanded to New York in 2011 and Shanghai in 2021. Logsdail’s early commitment to artists including Carl Andre, Richard Long and Sol LeWitt defined the gallery’s intellectual seriousness, a curatorial stance that shapes every decision, whether in its permanent galleries or at art fairs.

Art Mumbai runs 12 to 15 November 2026 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Nariman Point. Lisson Gallery’s booth presents not work for sale but a statement about how contemporary art investigates fundamental questions: what do we see when we look, and what does looking change in us.

Anish Kapoor’s practice spans five decades of investigation into reflection, void and the phenomenology of space. His polished steel works, which dominate Lisson Gallery’s booth, belong to a series he began in the 1980s, evolving from his early experiments with pigment and surface into monumental interventions that implicate the viewer’s own body in the act of looking. The mirror finish is not decoration but method: it collapses the distance between object and observer, making the gallery visitor complicit in what the sculpture reveals.

Lisson Gallery, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967 in a converted shop on Lisson Street in London’s Marylebone, began as a platform for emerging artists working in conceptual and minimalist traditions. The gallery moved to its current location on Bell Street in 1975 and has since expanded to New York in 2011 and Shanghai in 2021. Logsdail’s early commitment to artists including Carl Andre, Richard Long and Sol LeWitt established the gallery’s reputation for rigour and intellectual seriousness, a curatorial stance that continues to define how it selects and presents work in any context, from its permanent galleries to temporary presentations at art fairs.

The booth at Art Mumbai reflects Lisson Gallery’s practice of creating conversations across media and geography. Christopher Le Brun, represented by the gallery since the 1980s, brings gestural abstraction into dialogue with Kapoor’s geometric precision. Hiroshi Sugimoto, the Japanese photographer and filmmaker, and Ai Weiwei, whose work carries both formal rigour and political urgency, represent the breadth of artistic inquiry the gallery champions. Each artist in the booth, whether working in sculpture, painting or photograph, shares a commitment to perception as the subject itself.

Art Mumbai, held annually since 2008, has grown into one of Asia’s major contemporary art fairs, drawing galleries and collectors from across the region and internationally. The fair takes place at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai’s Nariman Point. Lisson Gallery’s participation in this edition continues a pattern of international fair presence that keeps the work of its represented artists in dialogue with emerging collectors and institutions across Asia, while maintaining the gallery’s founding principle that serious artistic practice transcends geography and fashion.

Imagery courtesy of Lisson Gallery (@lisson_gallery).