Gagosian will be exhibiting eleven works from the collection of Michael Chow this autumn. The presentation is called Friends and Legends. It is split across two cities and arrives alongside the fall auction season.
The first part opens at the gallery’s Beverly Hills location and runs from November 4 to 7. That is a short stay. The second part moves to Gagosian’s new Madison Avenue gallery in New York, from November 14 to December 22.
The group of pictures took sixty years to assemble. Chow is the restaurateur behind Mr Chow, and he has spent his working life among artists. The first restaurant opened in Knightsbridge, London, in 1968. Beverly Hills followed in 1974 and New York in 1979. Over those decades, the dining rooms became a regular stop for the art world. Painters came first, then fashion people, then film people. They tended to stay late.
Larry Gagosian knows those rooms well. He says he has hosted parties there for more than thirty years, and that Chow has been a friend for even longer. In his view, no restaurant is more closely tied to art. He is glad to show the work in two cities where Chow has been a fixture for decades.
The heart of the show is portraiture. Chow sat for Jean Michel Basquiat, Peter Blake, Urs Fischer, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel and Andy Warhol. He commissioned these pictures from people who would go on to shape their era. Many of them hung in his restaurants for years. The care each artist put in says plenty about how close the relationships were.
There is something unusual in that approach. Collectors normally buy reputations that already exist. Chow asked young artists to look at him, then waited to see what they became.
Art and artists, he says, have been at the centre of his life. Every piece carries a story, a seat at the table and a friendship. Time has shown these artists to be among the great names of the century. Living with the work brought him joy. Now he wants it to leave the house, and he jokes that it is finally his turn to be looked at.
Food runs through the whole selection. Ruscha’s Mr Chow L.A., from 1973, spells out the restaurant’s name in paint made from its own kitchen. He used egg yolk, soybean paste, beet and coconut milk. The picture followed his Chocolate Room, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1970, and shares its taste for odd materials.
Warhol appears twice. His Portrait of Michael Chow, from 1984, repeats the sitter across two panels coated in shimmering diamond dust. The earlier piece dates from 1959. It is a three-panel folding screen featuring a large drawing of Torte àà la Camp, plus a recipe written with a wink. It has stood for years in the Beverly Hills restaurant, near the desserts.
Basquiat painted Chow in 1985. Chow remembers the sitting clearly. Basquiat made a forceful image, then covered it with ferocious strokes, never glancing at his subject or the canvas. Chow calls him a master of controlled accidents. He finds the result personal, perceptive and full of affection.
Haring’s Green Prawns in a Bowl of Noodles, from 1986, was a long-time fixture at the Beverly Hills restaurant. It has his lively line and bright colour. Three versions of Chow Bob in a bowl of one of the house specialities. It is hard to imagine a more fitting subject for a dining room wall.
Other works fill out the group. Blake contributes a classic Pop picture. Hockney drew a half-length portrait from life. Ruscha made a tribute to Chow’s father. Schnabel built a portrait from paint and broken plates, some of them fine china from Mr Chow. Fischer made a sculpture out of candles
One object may be the most revealing. The Artist Drawing Book is large and crowded with drawings and inscriptions, many of which were made in real time at the table. Basquiat, Haring, Hockney and Schnabel all added to it. So did Francis Bacon, Francesco Clemente, Mark Grotjahn, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson and Cy Twombly, among many others. It reads like an archive of long evenings. It also secures the restaurant’s standing as both a cultural and a culinary institution.
Seen together, the works suggest how closely the restaurant and the art grew up side by side. Plates end up in a painting. Noodles end up in a picture. A dessert recipe sits beside a drawing. The dining room was never just a backdrop. It was a studio, a salon and a gallery all at once.
Now the pictures leave their posts. The Warhol screen steps away from the desserts. The Haring leaves its wall. Chow, who spent decades feeding artists, hands his friends back to the public.
Top Photo: Andy Warhol, Portrait of Michael Chow (1984)© 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Josh White. Courtesy Gagosian