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I reflected upon the reflections on the water, like the fishermen do.
—Willem de Kooning
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Willem de Kooning. Curated by Klaus Kertess and presented in cooperation with the Johanna Liesbeth de Kooning Trust, twenty-three works attest to the final transformations in the artist’s oeuvre during the 1980s.
During his long career, de Kooning made several radical stylistic shifts. In the 1940s, somber black-and-white abstractions ceded to powerful, sometimes ferocious women. These were followed by serene pastoral landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s, he abandoned his luscious surfaces of thick impasto for luminous expanses of pastel-imbued whites, overlaid with ribbons of vivid color. This work may be understood as a logical refinement of, rather than a break with, the subjects and forms of his prior explorations, including body and landscape. Throughout, de Kooning’s dexterous manipulations of paint yielded works that teemed with the energy of his surroundings, including a gritty 1940s Manhattan and the bucolic ocean vistas of eastern Long Island. Applying paint with a brush or a scraper’s knife, he rendered the physical form either as a subtle body fragment or as a more raucous figure, declaring that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Paintings from the eighties juxtaposed with works from preceding decades reveal many formal relationships, as well as trace an evolution from the densely layered surfaces of the late seventies and early eighties to the clean, crisp lines of the mid-eighties and the rich, ebullient compositions of the artist's final working years.
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There is Woman in the Landscapes: Willem de Kooning from 1959 to 1963
Lauren Mahony considers a critical four-year period in the painter’s career, examining the technical changes that occurred between his “abstract parkway landscapes” of the late 1950s and the “pastoral landscapes” that succeeded them, as well as the impact on his work of his impending move to Springs, New York.
Book Corner
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Wyatt Allgeier discusses the 1984 Arion Press edition of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, featuring prints by Richard Avedon, Alex Katz, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and more.
In Conversation
Claude Picasso and John Richardson
Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson sits down with Claude Picasso to discuss Claude’s photography, his enjoyment of vintage car racing, and the future of scholarship related to his father, Pablo Picasso.
Jenny Saville on Willem de Kooning
In 2013, the exhibition Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983–1985 explored the legendary artist’s late work. For the catalogue accompanying the presentation, Jenny Saville spoke on the gestures and elemental elegance of these paintings.