SETSUKO: KINGDOM OF CATS
Gagosian is pleased to announce Kingdom of Cats, an exhibition of works by Setsuko that represents the first time the artist has shown her bronze and ceramic sculptures in New York.
January 15 - March 1, 2025
In her sculptures, Setsuko renders natural subjects with rich, tactile surfaces, uniting organic and constructed elements to represent the symbiosis of life and death. In her gouache and watercolor paintings of still-life and floral arrangements, domestic interiors, and landscapes, she conveys the joy embodied in crafted objects, organic forms, and atmospheric spaces. Combining ancient Eastern traditions with twentieth-century Western ideas, Setsuko interprets the everyday in ways that are at once lyrical and precise.
As the exhibition’s title suggests, cats make repeated appearances in the works on view. The lively creatures, of which Setsuko has owned dozens, have cropped up frequently in the artist’s practice over the years, always conveying a sense of agency and animating the spaces through which they move. Cats are important symbols in Japanese folklore regarded as possessing special abilities; the classification kaibyō (“strange cat”) includes bakeneko, a yōkai or supernatural entity with the ability to shapeshift into human form. Maneki-neko, on the other hand, are usually depicted as waving figurines empowered to bring their owners good luck. Setsuko’s late husband, Balthus, also referred to himself as the “King of Cats.”
Trees and other plants are also the subjects of Setsuko’s hand-painted bronzes, which include a new large-scale representation of a fig tree with foliage and attendant animals, finished in a dark green patina. In Le chat et la vie (2024), the tree’s circular form embodies the cycle of life, a theme reinforced by the subject’s historical symbolic significance—fig trees are often referenced in antique and religious texts. In two other bronzes, Chandelier (le vigne) (2021) and Grand Chandelier (grenades) (2023), the natural organisms of the works’ titles are refigured as baroque candelabras.
The paintings on paper, canvas, and wood in Kingdom of Cats are mostly delicate still-life arrangements and domestic interiors. The earliest, Nature morte avec branches de kumquat, is from around 1960 and the most recent, Bouquet de printemps III, was completed in 2023. Paysage d’Italie (2023) is a landscape study representing the loggia of the artist’s former house at Montecalvello, near Rome.