Art News

After Forty Years, Lisson Gallery Revisits John Latham’s First Solo Exhibition

LONDON.- Forty years on from John Latham’s first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in 1970, the gallery revisits works and actions from that seminal show in the wider context of the artist’s work through the 1970s, a period of extraordinary innovation, productivity and influence. The work Latham made during this decade, beginning with the Lisson show, confirmed his position at the forefront of the new conceptual and event-based artistic practices. Through the diverse work he was producing in sculpture, film, painting, text, and performance, he also began to distil his ‘Time-Base Theorem’. At the heart of the theory is a scale or spectrum, a cosmological system for understanding all phenomena – physical and metaphysical – in terms of time and event. The current exhibition attempts a physical embodiment of Latham’s concept