Gagosian is pleased to announce Seeing Through: Jia Aili’s Parallel Paintings, a major exhibition of new works by the artist. This is Jia’s first solo presentation at the gallery in Beverly Hills and marks his first solo project with Gagosian since 2019’s Combustion in New York.
A key figure in Chinese contemporary painting, Jia crafts expansive, dynamic compositions that engage with classic art historical modes. Challenging established visual conventions in the context of a rapidly changing world, he responds directly to the fluid nature of contemporary experience. In these canvases, natural landscapes, historical images, and abstract forms intertwine as the artist reconfigures source material from disparate periods and cultures to build a complex, layered reality that resists any singular narrative.
In the Beverly Hills exhibition, Jia deepens these ongoing investigations while introducing, for the first time, a concept he has developed and terms parallel painting, through which he liberates painting from a single flat plane by allowing painterly marks to unfold across parallel strata. Within this new body of work, points, lines, planes, geometric brushstrokes, and passages of color suggest the presence of connections within the contemporary world that are real yet mysterious and not readily perceived. Rather than conforming to a fixed spatial order, these elements overlap and shift as we view them, continually forming new relationships.
© Jia Aili Studio
Photo: Takeru Koroda
Courtesy Gagosian
