Willem de Kooning

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). Held in celebration of what would have been the artist’s one hundredth birthday on April 24, the exhibition highlights five decades of the prolific artist’s career. The project has been curated by David Whitney, an independent curator who has authored books on Jasper Johns, David Salle, and Andy Warhol.

The selection of thirty-nine paintings documents de Kooning’s stylistic transition during the years 1946 through 1988. Focused on the artist's abstraction, the exhibition brings together the Surrealist-influenced compositions of the 1940s, the landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s, the gestural paintings of the 1970s, and the luminous canvases of the 1980s. Such a grouping reveals de Kooning's continual fascination with color and natural light, as well as the means by which the artist, who called himself a “slipping glimpser,” managed to incorporate representations of the surrounding world into even his most abstract works. The exhibition, which has been organized with the full support of the de Kooning Trust and Foundation, features loans from private collections as well as museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.