About the artwork
Produced in 1997, this ink on China paper bears witness to Zao Wou-Ki's full artistic maturity. The composition is organized around a powerful mass of dark ink that runs across the upper part of the work, while a more diffuse, horizontal zone unfolds in the center, evoking a mist or suspended landscape. The subtle interplay between density and lightness, between fullness and emptiness, reflects the heritage of Chinese pictorial tradition, which the artist reinterprets with a profoundly modern sensibility. From the personal collection of Vladimir Velickovic, with whom Zao Wou-Ki maintained a relationship of friendship and mutual esteem in Paris, this work was part of an exchange between the two artists. It thus bears the trace of an intimate dialogue between two major figures on the international art scene. At the crossroads of East and West, this ink fully embodies Zao Wou-Ki's universe: a vibrant, free space where abstraction becomes inner landscape.
Expert opinion
The ink on paper shown here, dated 1997, clearly belongs to the corpus of works produced by Zao Wou-Ki in the 1990s, a period of great mastery and gestural freedom. The signature and date, in the lower right-hand corner, are in keeping with the artist's custom. The quality of the brushwork, the internal tension of the composition, and the subtle dialogue between masses of dense ink and spaces left in reserve, fully correspond to the plastic vocabulary developed by Zao Wou-Ki during this period. The work comes from the personal collection of Vladimir Velickovic, an artist with whom Zao Wou-Ki maintained a relationship of friendship and regular exchanges in Paris. The fact that it was acquired as part of an exchange between the two artists reinforces its historical coherence and traceability.
About the artist
Born in 1920 in Beijing (China) and died in 2013, Zao Wou-Ki learned from an early age to draw the characters of the Chinese alphabet, the basis of calligraphy. At the age of 15, he entered the Fine Arts School in Hangzhou (China). After becoming a teacher, he held his first solo exhibition, marked by the French influences of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, in 1941. In the late '40s, the cultural attaché of the French Embassy in China urged him to move to Paris, where he completed his art studies. Becoming friends with Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, the Chinese artist surrounded himself with the greatest artists of his time. His discovery of lithography and abstraction in the 1950s marked a turning point in his career, as he "aimed for a new, imaginary and indecipherable form of writing". Today considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Zao Wou-Ki is exhibited in the greatest museums (Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Tate Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York...) and, following his death, has his own room at the Bridgestone Museum of Art (Japan). Today, he achieves record sales at the most prestigious auction houses ($65 million, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2018).
Additional info
Signed
Dated
Framed
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