Balthus

From time to time, amidst all the trials and errors, it happens: I recognize what I was looking for. All of a sudden the vision that pre-existed incarnates itself, more or less intuitively and more or less precisely. The dream and the reality are superimposed and made one.
—Balthus

Following Balthus: The Last Studies at Gagosian, New York (2013–14) and Balthus at Gagosian, Paris (January–February 2015), Gagosian, Hong Kong, is pleased to announce a career-spanning exhibition of Balthus’s paintings, drawings, and photographs. Prepared in collaboration with the artist’s estate, this will be the first exhibition of his work in Hong Kong in twenty years.

Balthus was the reclusive painter of charged and disquieting narrative scenes, whose inspirative sources and embrace of exquisitely rigorous technique reach back to the early Renaissance, though with a subversive modern twist. Working independently of avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he turned to antecedents including Piero della Francesca and Gustave Courbet, appropriating their techniques to represent the physical and psychic struggles of adolescence. Casting viewers as voyeurs of pubescent female subjects brooding with uneasy dreams, he scandalized Parisian audiences with his first gallery exhibition in 1934. In his interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes of the next seventy years, Balthus cultivated a self-taught classicism as a framework for more enigmatic artistic investigations.

Early ink studies of Paris streets and passersby demonstrate the evolution of what Balthus described as his “timeless realism.” His signature dramatic lighting and muted palette are already evident in the oil paintings Portrait of Pierre Leyris (1932–33), a depiction of the young translator lighting a cigarette after dinner; and Young Girl in Amazonian Costume (1932), shown in his notorious debut at Galerie Pierre two years later. In the droll self-portrait The King of Cats (1935), featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2013–14 exhibition “Balthus: Cats and Girls,” the 27-year-old artist presents himself wearing a jacket and tie, a cat nuzzling his feet; a stone tablet leaning against a stool is inscribed “A PORTRAIT OF H.M. THE KING OF CATS painted by HIMSELF.” A 1947 study in oil on board for the key large-scale painting The Card Game (1948–50) portrays two girls in modern dress, but rendered with a geometrical order more typical of the Renaissance. Brimming with juxtaposed patterns, Le Rêve II (1956–57) finds Frédérique Tison, the stepdaughter of the artist’s brother Pierre Klossowski, dreaming contently on a sofa as a second girl brings her a bright orange flower.