FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For press inquiries please contact: Janis Gardner Cecil (jcecil@marlboroughgallery.com)
at Marlborough Gallery, tel: 212.541.4900; fax: 212.541.4948.
Zao Wou-Ki
Recent Works
April 30 - May 24, 2003
The Directors of
Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce the opening this April of
an exhibition of paintings by the preeminent Paris-based Chinese artist,
Zao Wou-Ki. This exhibition will be Zao’s first show at Marlborough
Gallery and the first in New York since 1986 when he last showed at
the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Marlborough’s show also will precede
a major retrospective of his work at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de
Paume in Paris to take place in October 2003. Zao has lived in France
since 1948, and the Galerie Nationale’s exhibition is framed around
the body of work created since his arrival in France.
Zao
was born in Peking in 1921. His family dates back to the Song period
(10th–12th century.) He began his training at the age of 14 at
the School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.
He
left for Paris in 1948 to study modern painting with the result that
Paul Klee had a deep influence on his early work. He became a part of
the group of painters associated with the School of Paris, in particular,
Pierre Soulages and Nicolas de Staël. He also became friends with
Giacometti and Sam Francis as well as with musicians and poets, especially
Henri Michaux to whom a large triptych in Marlborough’s show is
dedicated. From 1955 until his last show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery
he traveled often to New York and became friends with Barnett Newman,
Franz Kline, William Baziotes, Saul Steinberg, and Hans Hoffman. The
freshness and spontaneity of American painting appealed to his aesthetic
interests and to his vivid knowledge of both Eastern and Western art.
It is this amalgam of cultures as manifested in both traditional Chinese
painting and abstract Western painting which informs Zao’s art
and places it, aesthetically and formally, in a unique and important
position in the history of painting.
There
will be an introduction by I.M. Pei to the catalog of Marlborough’s
show and a preface written by Jonathan Hay, Associate Professor of Fine
Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
In
1994 Zao received personally from the Emperor of Japan the Imperial
Prize for Painting. In 1998 a retrospective of his paintings traveled
to Shanghai, Peking and Canton. In 2002 he was elected to the Académie
des arts et lettres in Paris.
Zao’s
work can be found in over one hundred museums worldwide. Among them
are the following: Fogg Art Museum, Boston, MA; Art Institute of Chicago;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, Canada; Fonds National
d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation François
Pinault, Paris, France; The Tate Gallery London, England; Folkwang Museum,
Essen, Germany; Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Musée
Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil; National Institute of Fine Arts, Beijing, China;
Hong Kong Museum of Art, China; Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan;
Taiwan Museum of Art; National Museum of History, Taipei; Taipei Fine
Arts Museum, Taiwan: Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain; The Museum
of Tel Aviv, Israel; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy; Fukuoka
Art Museum, Japan; Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; National
Museum of Art, Japan; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo
Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Fundaçao Calouste
Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; Collection Thyssen Bornemisza, Castagnola,
Switzerland.
An
illustrated color catalog of the Zao Wou-Ki show will be available at
the time of the exhibition.
return to exhibition page
