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Willem de Kooning

The Last Beginning

September 18–October 27, 2007
West 21st Street, New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view

Artwork © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation video Play Button

Installation video

Works Exhibited

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1983 Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, [no title], 1983

Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled XIII, 1982 Oil on canvas, 77 × 88 inches (195.6 × 223.5 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled XIII, 1982

Oil on canvas, 77 × 88 inches (195.6 × 223.5 cm)
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled VII, 1981 Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled VII, 1981

Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled VI, 1979 Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Untitled VI, 1979

Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm)
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Fire Island, 1946 Paper collage with enamel on board, 24 ⅛ × 36 ⅛ inches (61.2 × 91.7 cm)© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Fire Island, 1946

Paper collage with enamel on board, 24 ⅛ × 36 ⅛ inches (61.2 × 91.7 cm)
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

About

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.