The Lisson Gallery turned forty this year, and in celebration its summer show explored the work of a new generation of (mostly European) artists whose practices are rooted in the Conceptual work that the gallery helped pioneer. Curated by Emily Pethick (director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht), “Imagine Action” was billed as a “look at the space between the individual and the social”—a phrase that raises various teasing problems. Given the inseparability of constructions of individual identity and collective social formations, this “space” might be nonexistent. And yet if

Even before graduating from London’s Royal College of Art master’s program in 2004, Varda Caivano had been spotted by collectors, gallerists, and critics alike for her beautiful, small-scale, intensely painterly works. Caivano (born in Buenos Aires and based in London) is a young painter plainly enamored of her medium, bringing fresh eyes and hands to test the entire act of applying paint to a canvas. The brushstroke, the choice of palette, the canvas, the thickness of the paint; flatness and relief, figuration and abstraction, decoration and image, surface and depth: It all seems of infinite