Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting
Curated by Cecilia Alemani
April 15–June 14, 2025
555 West 24th Street, New York
Willem de Kooning arrived in New York from the Netherlands in 1926 as a stowaway with little more than his ambition and a background in commercial design. Trained at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, he brought with him a rigorous understanding of draftsmanship, which would later underpin his explosive forays into abstraction. In the burgeoning art scene of Depression-era New York, he found work as a house painter and muralist, but his real education came from fellow artists and the city itself. By the 1940s, he emerged as a central figure in the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline. His breakthrough came with the Women series in the early 1950s—works that scandalized critics but cemented his reputation as one of Abstract Expressionism’s most formidable voices. De Kooning’s canvases didn’t just break with tradition; they tore it open, mixing figuration and abstraction in ways that still feel unruly and alive.
Willem de Kooning’s work has long resisted easy summarization, but Gagosian’s Endless Painting, curated with bold restraint by Cecilia Alemani, reminds us why the artist’s restlessness still feels so electric. In this focused presentation, the familiar tug-of-war between figuration and abstraction surges across the canvases, reaffirming that for de Kooning, painting was not just a medium but a verb—a continuous act of wrestling, slathering, erasing, and revising.
The show spans decades but resists chronology, instead staging works in subtle visual conversations. A 1969 piece like Montauk II vibrates with palette-knife immediacy: smeared pistachio greens, bleached flesh tones, and sudden jolts of crimson jostle against one another in a controlled cacophony. Its rhythm is oceanic, tidal—befitting the coastal light and isolation of his Long Island studio. And yet, the painting avoids romanticism. It’s not about Montauk; it’s about motion. The brush doesn’t describe the landscape—it inhabits it.
Nearby, Woman as Landscape (1954–55) snarls with psychic torque. This is classic de Kooning: the female form warped into a whirlwind of desire, fear, and painterly bravado. Her limbs dissolve into smeared bands of color; her body is both ground and figure, flesh and terrain. It’s a difficult, violent, stunning painting—one that pulses with the postwar anxieties of gender, consumption, and power. And yet, it’s not didactic. The painting doesn’t preach; it flays.
Alemani’s curatorial hand is invisible in the best way. She allows the paintings to speak for themselves, wisely avoiding over-contextualization. The title, Endless Painting, isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a thesis. De Kooning never finished a painting so much as abandoned it mid-battle, and you can feel that in every brushstroke—something unresolved, hungry, alive.
De Kooning’s work matters now more than ever because it refuses closure. In an age obsessed with clean narratives, algorithmic precision, and the flattening effects of digital imagery, his paintings remain defiantly analog—feral, unresolved, and gloriously human. They foreground process over product, doubt over certainty. His gestural chaos is not decorative but existential, a visual articulation of flux and fracture. As contemporary artists return to figuration, grapple with identity, and reclaim the body, de Kooning’s canvases feel oddly prescient—not as blueprints, but as provocations. They remind us that to paint is to question, to feel one’s way through the mire of being.
What this exhibition affirms is that de Kooning’s greatness lies not in innovation alone, but in persistence. He believed, radically, that painting could absorb everything: the body, the landscape, the mess of history. And miraculously, it still does.
