HONG KONG.- Gagosian announced its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 with a presentation of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by a group of international artists. The works on view offer a complex variety of approaches to interrelated themes including aspects of abstraction and perspectives on the natural world.
Participating artists include Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Louise Bonnet, Carol Bove, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Edmund de Waal, Jadé Fadojutimi, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Katharina Grosse, Jennifer Guidi, Lauren Halsey, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Jia Aili, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Rick Lowe, Henry Moore, Sabine Moritz, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Rudolf Stingel, Tatiana Trouvé, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Mary Weatherford, Stanley Whitney, Christopher Wool, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Bove’s sculpture Parallel Friction (2025) is comprised of reclaimed scaffolding “soldier beams” that function as the pedestal for a crumpled steel tube that has been bent into a loop and painted a vibrant orange. The object’s varied surface treatments prompt questions about the presumed “inherent” qualities of the material world. In Untitled (2025), Oehlen tests the limits of visual coherence and readability, here beginning with the painterly motif of the bather. Combining drips and gestures with unexpected combinations of color and texture, he rejects the possibility of stable form and fixed signification. Frankenthaler’s Untitled (1966) also reflects on visual indeterminacy, abstracting from the realm of landscape through the juxtaposition of stained color fields and irregular borders, evoking shifting organic boundaries.
Turrell’s That Known (2024), from the Glassworks series, incorporates a computer-controlled LED panel that features a plane of light visible through a rectangular aperture. Changing color over an extended period, the work plays with perceptions of space, a gap between its glass frontage and the gallery wall into which it is set ensuring that the tint also radiates out into the surrounding interior. In Springtime (2025–26), Weatherford explores the ambient chromatics of earth and sky while pursuing a mythological theme resonant with the changing seasons. A luminous painting in vinyl emulsion augmented by a pink neon tube, it imagines the joyous renewal that follows Persephone’s return from the underworld.
In Verde del bosco – estate 2017 (2017), Penone depicts a verdant forest by wrapping cotton fibers around the trunks of living trees, allowing the furrows of their bark to be imprinted onto the fabric, and using leaves to produce frottage rubbings. By aligning plants’ outer coverings with the layer of skin that protects our bodies, he aligns the natural world with human experience. Cattelan’s white Carrara marble sculpture Rain (2025) portrays a severed human head lying on a cushion and covered in frogs, an allusion to the biblical plague of Egypt and, more straightforwardly, to the deluges of various small animals that occasionally result from unusual meteorological conditions.
In his painting Valley and Line (2020), Jia depicts a snowy mountain range, augmenting his ongoing pursuit of historical and literary themes by representing an actual location that resonates with the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). The image is shown under glass inscribed with linear designs that allude in part to its spiritual mystery. Finally, Zeng’s Untitled (2025–26) depicts a human skull in a manner that revisits and reexamines Pointillist technique. In this new work, fine layered brushstrokes conjure a figurative image that, while instantly recognizable from a distance, collapses into kaleidoscopic multihued abstraction when observed up close.
