Gagosian is putting the art collection of Mr. Chow founder Michael Chow on public view. The gallery will present eleven works assembled over six decades under the title Friends and Legends, opening in Beverly Hills from November 4 to 7, 2026, before travelling to the gallery's new Madison Avenue space in New York, where it runs from November 14 to December 22 alongside the autumn auction season.

The show is built around portraits of Chow himself, many of which hung in his restaurants over the years. The line-up includes Andy Warhol's two-panel diamond-dust Portrait of Michael Chow from 1984 and a 1959 folding screen with a dessert drawing, alongside portraits by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Blake, Urs Fischer, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel. Schnabel's portrait incorporates broken plates from the restaurant.

One of the most talked-about inclusions is Basquiat's 1985 portrait of Chow. According to the gallery's announcement, Chow recalled sitting for the artist and watching him paint over the image without looking at either sitter or canvas, producing a forceful, unexpected result. An artist drawing book filled with sketches and inscriptions left by restaurant guests over the years will also be shown, with contributions from figures including Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Louise Nevelson and Francesco Clemente.

Chow opened his first restaurant in Knightsbridge, London, in 1968, followed by Beverly Hills in 1974 and New York in 1979, and the venues became gathering places for artists, fashion figures and entertainers. Gallery founder Larry Gagosian, who has hosted parties at Mr. Chow for more than thirty years, described the restaurant as inseparable from the art world and said he was pleased to present works from a collection shaped by decades of friendship.

Chow himself framed the presentation as a farewell of sorts, saying that art and artists have been at the heart of his life and that it was time for the works to go out into the world.