Behind the Art
Setsuko: Into the Trees
Setsuko takes Jean-Olivier Després on a tour of her exhibition of terra-cotta and enameled ceramics in Paris, explaining her passion for trees and describing her approach to painting.
Nature is my master. Without its guidance, how could I paint or work? My Swiss garden is surrounded by forests and mountains. I look closely; Nature shows me.
—Setsuko
Gagosian is pleased to present Into the Trees, terra-cotta and enameled ceramics by Setsuko. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.
Working across many mediums, from bronze to gouache, Setsuko combines sumptuous surfaces with tranquil subject matter, often suggesting an optimistic interconnectedness between natural and constructed elements, as well as a symbiosis between life and death.
Blending imagery from East and West, Setsuko’s paintings demonstrate a keen sensitivity to texture, from the fur of a cat to the silken petals of a flower. This attention to diverse surface qualities led her to ceramics and the infinite malleability and expressiveness of clay.
Setsuko takes Jean-Olivier Després on a tour of her exhibition of terra-cotta and enameled ceramics in Paris, explaining her passion for trees and describing her approach to painting.
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.
Join Setsuko on a tour of her exhibition at the Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau in Rueil-Malmaison, France, the former residence of Empress Joséphine. The video brings together the artist; Isabelle Tamisier-Vétois, chief curator, and Élisabeth Caude, director, Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau; and Benoît Astier de Villatte, cofounder of the atelier Astier de Villatte, Paris. They discuss the origins and development of the project, which is designed as a dialogue between Setsuko’s work and the decorative ceramics held in the museum’s collection.
On the twentieth anniversary of Balthus’s death, Setsuko gives an intimate tour of the Grand Chalet and reflects on how the 1754 Swiss mountain home enriched their lives as artists.
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Setsuko Klossowska de Rola and Benoît Astier de Villatte, of the Astier de Villatte atelier in Paris, first met at the Académie de France in Rome’s Villa Medici, where Setsuko lived when her late husband, the painter Balthus, was the school’s director. Here they discuss Setsuko’s newest body of terra-cotta works, produced at Astier de Villatte, with Gagosian’s Elsa Favreau.
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.