Zao Wou-Ki

Chinese, French · 1920–2013

Chinese-French painter who arrived in Paris in 1948 and developed a lyrical abstraction bringing together European gestural painting with the spatial sensibility and calligraphic energy of Chinese ink painting. His large canvases from the 1950s onward, with their atmospheric light and fluid mark-making, made him one of the most significant painters of postwar modernism.