Cai Guo-Qiang, Explosions of Color

Cai Guo-Qiang returns to London more than twenty years after his landmark explosive event on the Millennium Bridge and in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Coinciding with Frieze London, from 26 September to 9 November 2025, the exhibition Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015-2025 places his radical use of gunpowder at the centre of a new monographic show. The exhibition brings together a selection of paintings created over the past decade, works in which the artist applies explosives directly onto paper, canvas, glass and mirror, transforming painting into a performative and unpredictable gesture. After three decades dominated by black, since the early 2000s Cai has progressively introduced coloured powders, seeking a more painterly and nuanced dimension while maintaining a strong connection to abstraction and the nature of the medium. His experimental use of materials is combined with subtle references to flora and fauna, as well as echoes of the Western canon and the Old Masters. These works, though radical in approach, encourage a profound reflection on painting, on history and on art as process rather than mere image. This exhibition marks a significant stage in the artist’s trajectory, from China to the global stage: after shows at the Met, the Guggenheim in New York, the Prado, the Uffizi, and his direction of the visual effects for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Cai now returns to the British capital with a new chapter of his artistic vision. Cai Guo-Qiang’s profile as an artist capable of transforming explosions into painting embraces themes that reach beyond the visible: energy, transformation, memory, nature. These new works convey, through controlled violence, a visual language that is powerful, suspended between spectacle and reflection.