Works Exhibited
![Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1988 Oil on canvas, 70 × 80 inches (177.8 × 203.2 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York](https://gagosian.com/media/images/exhibitions/2004/willem-de-kooning-a-centennial-exhibition/wXuWofaHPSne_585x329.jpg)
About
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.
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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.
