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Stepping into the era…
Stepping into the era…
1904 – 1997
He kept painting in struggle, as if resolution would be a lie.
Where They Stand
In Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning refused to choose cleanly between figure and abstraction.
Biography
De Kooning never let painting settle. He came to America as a young immigrant and worked as a house painter, commercial artist, and eventually one of New York’s fiercest painters. His surfaces are restless, scraped, revised, attacked, and rebuilt.
He refused the clean divide between abstraction and figuration. Women, landscapes, bodies, and gestures appear and disappear in paint that seems to argue with itself. His work can be exhilarating and troubling, especially in the way desire and violence meet in the figure.
De Kooning made painting feel like struggle that refuses resolution.
The Work Remembers
His surfaces argue, scrape, return, and refuse to settle.
The Works
His works feel excavated from motion, body, memory, and paint that will not behave.
Later painters inherited his permission to let desire, violence, revision, and form remain unresolved.
Door to the River
Willem de Kooning
image forthcoming
Willem de Kooning · 1960