Zao Wou-Ki

Galerie Dreyfus, Paris

Private collection, Switzerland

This vibrant watercolor is representative of the connection Zao Wou-Ki made between his Chinese heritage and the major influences gathered from contemporary artists such as Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, Joan Mitchell and the early watercolors of Jackson Pollock, while expressing a more introspected feeling leading him to lyrical abstraction. This technique, less sculptural than oil, perfectly illustrates how the tension is built on a simple sheet of paper rendered by transparent layers of various intensity to make the spectator feel and hear reality in its complexity, caught between the creative instinct, the swiftness of the momentum and its necessary imprint onto materiality. A color in particular would accompany his oeuvre throughout his career. Stunned by the lapis lazuli from the Old Masters he rediscovered in Paris, the vibrant hues of blue seen in our work embrace a deep-rooted affinity and intensive use throughout the various stylistic periods of Zao Wou-Ki.

This work is an example from a critical period of Zao Wou-Ki’s creative process that matured between 1940 and 1950. In the 1960s, its abstraction still refers to nature but displays a profound introspection no longer connected to the reality of time and space, setting his works in between the idea of reality and its substance. In this regard, it is interesting to note that from 1958, Zao Wou-Ki progressively stops titling his works, only designating them with their date of creation. No longer connecting them to human perception, he embraced a sort of abstraction defined by Mark Tobey: “Abstract Art does not exist (…) We always need to start from something, then you can erase all traces of reality”. The present watercolor is typical of this approach, displaying a telluric movement shaped by colors, silence and voids suggesting an emotional and personal reading typical of Zao as he said himself: “What is abstract to you is real for me”.

Executed in 1960 during one of the most significant times for the artist, this extremely desirable work has remained in private hands since it was acquired at the Galerie Dreyfus in Paris twenty years ago and can be considered as a milestone in its research for abstraction.