Michael Chow's Artist Portraits Gather at Gagosian
Gagosian brings Michael Chow’s commissioned portraits by Basquiat, Haring, Hockney, Ruscha, Warhol, and others to Beverly Hills before a longer New York...
By Weston Deboer
October 28, 2026 · 3 min read
Ed Ruscha, Mr. Chow L.A., 1973. Organic substances on canvas, 50 × 56 inches. © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Josh White. Image courtesy Gagosian.
Before Michael Chow returned to painting under the name Zhou Yinghua, he built a collection around another kind of creative exchange. His restaurants became gathering places where artists, filmmakers, actors, and designers crossed paths, and where commissioned portraits turned friendship into a visual archive.
Friends and Legends: The Collection of Michael Chow brings eleven works from that archive to Gagosian Beverly Hills for a brief presentation from November 4 through 7. Drawn from a collection developed over sixty years, the exhibition precedes a longer stop at the gallery’s new Madison Avenue space in New York.
A restaurant as an art-world crossroads
Chow opened the first Mr. Chow in Knightsbridge, London, in 1968, followed by Beverly Hills in 1974 and New York in 1979. The restaurants became known not only for food and theatrical service but for the artists who gathered there and the works that surrounded them.
The portraits in Friends and Legends were commissioned from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Blake, Urs Fischer, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol. Many have hung in Mr. Chow locations, allowing the collection to function in public even while remaining deeply personal.
Portraits without a single formula
Ed Ruscha’s Mr. Chow L.A. (1973) is an especially apt emblem for the Beverly Hills presentation. Made with organic substances on canvas, the painting predates the restaurant’s Los Angeles opening by a year. Its blunt lettering treats the name as both portrait and place, compressing a person, a business, and a social scene into one image.
Basquiat’s Untitled (1985), released in connection with the New York chapter of the exhibition, takes a radically different route. A large head emerges through oil-stick lines, words, repeated marks, and areas of scraped color. Rather than settle into likeness, the portrait records energy and exchange. Together, the works suggest why Chow’s project matters: each commission asked a distinct artist to interpret the same magnetic subject without surrendering their own language.
Two cities, one collection
The Beverly Hills exhibition opens Wednesday, November 4, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and remains on view only through Saturday, November 7. Gagosian is located at 456 North Camden Drive and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The presentation then travels to Gagosian at 980 Madison Avenue, where it runs from November 14 through December 22. That second chapter places the portraits in New York, another city inseparable from Chow’s history and the artistic relationships represented by the collection.
Visit the official Gagosian exhibition page for current visitor information.
