Konrad Fischer Galerie is delighted to present Jim Lambie: High Voltage, the inaugural exhibition of 2026 and the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery since joining the program in 2004. Rooted in the transformation of found and repurposed materials, Jim Lambie’s practice reflects a long-standing relationship with music and color, formed by his early years as a musician, as well as themes of space and light. His installations prompt viewers to recalibrate how they perceive and inhabit their surroundings. Through this dynamic interplay of ideas, and an inventive yet rigorous line of enquiry, Lambie creates experiences that often feel revelatory.
The exhibition’s title, ‘High Voltage,’ is an indirect reference to the gallery building’s former use as an electrical substation. Set out over two floors, the exhibition highlights Lambie’s responsiveness to the architectural spaces his work is shown in.
On the first floor, a new iteration of the artist’s iconic taped vinyl Zobop floor piece introduces a chromatic field in which reflective chrome and white stripes, scaled to the width of the building’s supporting beams, trace the architecture of the space from its outer edges inward, radiating across the floor. On the back wall, Lambie presents a potato sack painting that reframes painting as a threshold. Paper potato sacks, filled to varying degrees with expanding foam, are painted and mounted onto a white canvas, spilling into the room and projecting into the space.
In contrast, the second floor remains unadorned: an architectural 'off state' that establishes a deliberate counterpoint to the activated installation below. This oscillation between activation and pause, presence and absence, amplifies Lambie’s ongoing interest in perception, rhythm, and the latent potential of material and space.
Other works in the exhibition extend these material and perceptual concerns. Originating in urban observation, peeling posters and flyers on city walls, Lambie’s ongoing Metal Box works introduce another register of sustained experimentation, while works composed of repurposed lenses from sunglasses fused together with lead came refract color and light with vivid intensity. Together these works form constellations that reveal where light and color reside, in objects, on surfaces, and within the spatial environments that connect them.
The exhibition includes a live performance by Michael Clark, realized with four dancers and presented on the opening night. Clark’s work brings movement, presence, and physical intensity into the exhibition space, extending its spatial concerns through embodied practice and the shared experience of being in the room.
Jim Lambie was born in Scotland in 1964. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005 and represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. His first major artist monograph was published by Rizzoli, New York in the Spring of 2017. He lives and works in Glasgow.
Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Jim Lambie: Zobop (Color-Chrome)’ Vancouver Art Gallery (2025-26); ‘Hot Foam’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2025); ‘Concrete Sphinx’, Oscaar Mouligne, Kyoto (2024); ‘Spiral Scratch’, Pacific Place, Hong Kong (2018); ‘La scala‘, Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin (2016); ‘Sun Rise, Sun Ra, Sunset’, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2015); Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); ‘Unknown Pleasures’, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2008); ‘Forever Changes’, Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Glasgow (2008); ‘RSVP: Jim Lambie’, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2008); and ‘Directions – Jim Lambie’, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2006). Selected group shows include: ‘You have to see it’, Fundación Juan March, Madrid (2025); ‘The Mirror of Production’, Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo (2022); ‘My Mapping’, Fundación van Gogh Museum, Arles (2020); ‘Op Art in Focus’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2018); ‘I still believe in miracles’, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2016); ‘You Imagine What You Desire’ 19th Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2014); ‘Undone: Making and Unmaking in Contemporary Sculpture’, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2010); ‘The New Décor’, Hayward Gallery, London (2010); ‘Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2009) & MOMA, New York (2008); and ‘Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century’, New Museum, New York (2007).
