ZAO WOU-KI, 1921-2013, - Lot 155

ZAO WOU-KI, 1921-2013, Untitled, 27.10.1992, oil on canvas, signed lower right, signed, titled and dated on back, 95x105 cm. This work is listed in the Zao Wou-Ki Foundation archives and will be reproduced in Volume III of the catalog raisonné currently in preparation. A certificate from the Fondation Zao Wou-Ki may be issued to the buyer by the Fondation Zao Wou-Ki after the sale. Friend of Pierre Soulages, Joan Miró and Henri Michaux, repeatedly decorated by France, Grand Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite national du Mérite, Officier des Arts et des Lettres, elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2002, celebrated by the retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1981, Zao Wou-Ki is today considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Born into a prominent Beijing family, he obtained his family's support to attend the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts in 1935. Aware that Paris was the center of the world's artistic life, he experienced the capital's artistic influence from a distance before moving to Paris in 1948. He settled in Montparnasse, where he rubbed shoulders with other members of the Nouvelle École de Paris, including Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Vieira da Silva, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. Zao Wou-Ki's painting remained figurative until the early 1950s, when he discovered Paul Klee's highly interiorized approach to abstraction. From the 1960s onwards, he no longer gave titles to his works, only dates. His art would then develop and transform itself between the influences of Chinese art, representing his roots, and the discoveries of Western art through contact with the avant-gardes. A central focus of his research was the technique of oil painting, which he explored and perfected throughout his life, demonstrating unparalleled originality and mastery thanks to his knowledge of Chinese painting techniques. These exchanges, reflections and incessant back-and-forth movements forged a unique, universal style that earned him worldwide renown from the 1970s onwards. A fusion of two artistic universes, his abstraction was marked by an exacerbated and sometimes violent gesturality, spurred on by the lyrical abstraction that he he discovered in the United States. The 1990s saw a gradual return to figuration, with references to nature and the elements that make up landscapes. Some of his paintings evoke Turner and the great Romantic symphonies. This emergence of the visible world goes hand in hand with a softer art, a plastic expression that has not forgotten what it owes to the art of Chinese ink, calligraphy and scholar painting. An absolutely rigorous yet fluid technique, made of overlaps and transparencies, leaving room for the void. Our 1992 canvas evokes a mountain landscape, lost in the clouds, in subtle harmonies of yellows, blues, oranges, pinks and a multitude of half-tones further enriched by transparencies and material effects. A halo of warm light seems to envelop this lithic wall. The painting becomes in turn stone, light, water, atmosphere, an object of contemplation and meditation, an elemental world reflecting the painter's thoughts, where the viewer can project his or her imagination.