Kingdom of Cats at Gagosian’s small uptown outpost on Park Avenue transports visitors into a serene, timeless realm where nature, craft, and culture merge. Gnarled, winding trees teem with surprises: snakes slither around their trunks, fruits dangle, and cats appear as playful presences. These felines — perched among trees, standing tall as independent ceramic figures, or depicted in the paintings on the walls — infuse the space with a quiet vitality, bridging the mystical and the everyday.
These beguiling works are by Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, known professionally as Setsuko. Born in 1942, the artist hails from a distinguished Samurai family with roots in Kyushu and Kyoto, Japan. At the age of 20, she met the painter Balthus, whom she married five years later; with him, she moved to Rome and then Switzerland. Her work seamlessly traverses Japanese and European cultural and artistic traditions. Her ceramic sculptures of trees, foliage, and animals, such as “Le serpent et la vigne” (2024), blend the intricate textures and organic forms of Edo-period Japanese art with a European approach to representation that prioritizes permanence and solidity. Tree-like sculptures, chandeliers, and candelabra harken back to the Japanese Shinto religion, in which trees are sacred objects of worship, while her sensitivity to the subject matter imbues her work with pathos.
Cats lurk and lounge in every corner of the exhibition, Setsuko’s take on the supernatural felines in Japanese mythology. A ceramic one coated in a white enamel glaze and adorned with a double gold chain and a large heart medallion sits elegantly on the gallery’s front desk (“Le grand chat au médaillon,” 2024), evoking the maneki-neko, a cat that greets visitors with a raised paw. “Le chat et la vie” (2024), a large, impressive bronze sculpture of a circular fig tree, symbolizes the circle of life; a cat resting serenely atop a branch brings together the ephemeral and eternal. In Japanese mythology, cats take on many roles. From the shape-shifting bakeneko to the corpse-stealing kasha, they are often portrayed in a nefarious light. While Setsuko’s cats pay homage to this deep cultural history, they lounge peacefully or gaze outward as understated protectors, exuding a sense of calm and untroubled ease.
Setsuko’s approach to sculpture is deeply tied to materiality, balancing fragility and endurance through her distinctive techniques. She often works with dark terracotta, layering it with white enamel glazes to create a luminous, almost ethereal surface — heightening the interplay between surface and depth, rawness and refinement, and the contrast between permanence and transience, which extends to her bronze works incorporating imagery from nature. Her paintings of still lifes and fantasy scenes, which hold equal weight in the exhibition, reflect the hushed tonalities of Morandi, the bold clarity of Matisse, and the distilled elegance of Japanese woodblock prints, and echo the quiet resonance of her sculptures. Some are done directly onto paint palettes, including an imaginative portrait of a woman composed of flowers and butterflies.
Across these media, Setusko embraces the tensions that structure our lives, shaping forms that, much like nature itself, are in constant dialogue with time.
Setsuko: Kingdom of Cats continues at Gagosian (821 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
