About

Over the course of his career, Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) developed a unique style that merged traditional Chinese painting with European modernism. Born in Beijing, Zao attended the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for six years before becoming an assistant professor at the school. In 1948 he traveled to Paris, which would eventually become his home, and formed friendships with artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. Zao’s style underwent a series of transformations during the 1950s: following a brief Paul Klee–inspired period, he completed a number of semiscriptural paintings whose markings evoked ancient Chinese carved oracle bones; he then adopted an even more saturated and abstract style after visiting the studios of many prominent Abstract Expressionists during a pivotal 1957 trip to New York. Zao received his first of many retrospectives in 1965 at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

In 1971 Zao temporarily turned away from oil painting and began focusing on smaller compositions in india ink while caring for his ill wife. Distraught by her passing the following year, he traveled to Shanghai to visit his family for the first time in over two decades. These events brought Zao closer to his Chinese roots, spurring him to develop a monochromatic brush-and-ink technique that wedded motifs from traditional Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting with visual cues from his network of Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. By the 1980s and 1990s, Zao had developed an increasingly substantial artistic presence in his birth country. The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, and the National Museum of History, Taipei, both staged important solo exhibitions of his work in 1983, and the Shanghai Museum organized a sixty-year retrospective, which also traveled to Beijing and Guangzhou between 1998 and 1999. In 2002 Zao was elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the following year he was celebrated with his first retrospective in France at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was awarded the title of Grand Officier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur in 2006.

The Art of the Olympics: An Interview with Yasmin Meichtry

The Art of the Olympics: An Interview with Yasmin Meichtry

The Olympic and Paralympic Games arrive in Paris on July 26. Ahead of this momentous occasion, Yasmin Meichtry, associate director at the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, Lausanne, Switzerland, meets with Gagosian senior director Serena Cattaneo Adorno to discuss the Olympic Games’ long engagement with artists and culture, including the Olympic Museum, commissions, and the collaborative two-part exhibition, The Art of the Olympics, being staged this summer at Gagosian, Paris.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024

The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.

Brooke Holmes, Katarina Jerinic, and Lissa McClure on Francesca Woodman

In Conversation
Brooke Holmes, Katarina Jerinic, and Lissa McClure on Francesca Woodman

Join Brooke Holmes, professor of Classics at Princeton University, and Lissa McClure and Katarina Jerinic, executive director and collections curator, respectively, at the Woodman Family Foundation, as they discuss Francesca Woodman’s preoccupation with classical themes and archetypes, her exploration of the body as sculpture, and her engagement with allegory and metaphor in photography.

David Cronenberg: The Shrouds

David Cronenberg: The Shrouds

David Cronenberg’s film The Shrouds made its debut at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in France. Film writer Miriam Bale reports on the motifs and questions that make up this latest addition to the auteur’s singular body of work.

Christo: Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014)

Christo: Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014)

Join Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, as he discusses the genesis of the artist’s work Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014), which Gagosian presented at Art Basel Unlimited 2024.

Oscar Murillo and Alessandro Rabottini

In Conversation
Oscar Murillo and Alessandro Rabottini

In conjunction with Marks and Whispers, at Gagosian, Rome, Oscar Murillo and Alessandro Rabottini sit down to discuss the artist’s paintings and works on paper in the exhibition, as well as how the show emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last decade.

BRONX BODEGA Basel

BRONX BODEGA Basel

On the occasion of Art Basel 2024, creative agency Villa Nomad joins forces with Ghetto Gastro, the Bronx-born culinary collective by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, to stage the interdisciplinary pop-up BRONX BODEGA Basel. The initiative brings together food, art, design, and a series of live events at the Novartis Campus, Basel, during the course of the fair. Here, Jon Gray from Ghetto Gastro and Sarah Quan from Villa Nomad tell the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier about the project.

Donald Judd: Untitled: 1970

Donald Judd: Untitled: 1970

In this video, Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of Judd Foundation, discusses a historic large-scale work by his father from 1970, ahead of its presentation at Art Basel Unlimited 2024.

A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE: An interview with Yoshiyuki Miyamae

A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE: An interview with Yoshiyuki Miyamae

Founded in 1998 by Issey Miyake, A-POC (“A Piece of Cloth”) set out to bring the development and production of fabric and garments into the future. Over the subsequent decades, A-POC has worked at the forefront of technology to realize its goals, and under the leadership of Yoshiyuki Miyamae—who has been with Miyake Design Studio since 2001—A-POC ABLE has engaged in a dynamic series of collaborations with artists, architects, craftspeople, and new technologies to rethink how clothing is designed and made. On the occasion of the line being made available in the United States for the first time, the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier visited the brand’s flagship in New York to speak with Yoshiyuki about the A-POC process, as well as the latest collaboration with the artist Sohei Nishino.

Jordan Wolfson and Johanna Burton

In Conversation
Jordan Wolfson and Johanna Burton

In this video, Gagosian presents a conversation between Jordan Wolfson and Johanna Burton, Maurice Marciano Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The pair discuss Wolfson’s animatronic work of art Body Sculpture (2023).

Jane Fonda: On Art for a Safe and Healthy California

Jane Fonda: On Art for a Safe and Healthy California

Art for a Safe and Healthy California is a benefit exhibition and auction jointly presented by Jane Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s to support the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California. Here, Fonda speaks with Gagosian Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about bridging culture and activism, the stakes and goals of the campaign, and the artworks featured in the exhibition.

Laguna~B

Laguna~B

An interview with Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda, artist, designer, and CEO and art director of the Venice-based glassware company Laguna~B.