Gagosian will present if you came this way, a new exhibition by Edmund de Waal, opening November 13, 2025, at the gallery’s Beverly Hills location. Known for his delicate porcelain vessels and meditative installations, de Waal continues his exploration of memory, exile, and material transformation through works that balance precision with poetic depth.
ART
The exhibition introduces a new series of gilded vitrines, a first for the artist. Here, de Waal applies gold leaf to oak using an ancient technique, juxtaposing the warmth of gold with the cool opacity of porcelain. These compositions recall religious reliquaries, transforming the vessel into both container and symbol, a holder of memory, devotion, and time.
Each installation invites quiet contemplation. In large-scale works such as as if even now you were sleeping, rain diary, and as long as it talks I am going to listen, groupings of vessels form rhythmic arrangements reminiscent of musical scores or lines of verse. De Waal also embeds fragments of poetry into porcelain tiles, referencing writers including T. S. Eliot, Louise Glück, Paul Celan, and Matsuo Bashō, voices that echo the exhibition’s recurring themes of exile and return.
“My whole life is trying to think about place and displacement, how things, people, and stories move, often against their will, across borders,” says de Waal. “I work with these themes in the objects that I make, finding spaces where they can be held in a place of some safety.”
The show’s title is drawn from Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942), a reflection on pilgrimage, fire, and renewal, ideas mirrored in de Waal’s own alchemical process of transforming clay through heat.
if you came this way coincides with de Waal’s ongoing exhibition the eight directions of the wind at The Huntington in San Marino, California, which runs through October 26, 2026.
