Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Midtown New York’s Pace Gallery is hosting its first exhibition of art by Willem de Kooning, of which it gained exclusive representation in the fall. Like much of the late artist’s own work, “The Figure: Movement and Gesture” is focused on and around the human body, as it is translated by different methods and techniques of representation. The show closes on July 29.
More text and images after the jump…
Willem de Kooning, “Woman” (1950), via goARTkids.
Willem de Kooning, “Montauk III” (1969), via Daily Art News.
Among the nearly forty works that comprise “The Figure: Movement and Gesture” are pieces rarely shown. On display are sculptures and paintings (and a few studies) dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, a pivotal few years for de Kooning. In these works, de Kooning explored the bounds that hold the human figure, working it into context and landscape, the second of which becoming increasingly central with the artist’s move from Manhattan to the Hamptons in Long Island in 1963. The figure is at points subsumed in and pulled horizontally or vertically out of the landscape, blurring and focusing, always part of its context, made of its context. “The figure,” de Kooning famously declared, “is nothing unless you twist it around like a strange miracle,” above and over and part of nature and the pastoral landscape.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Born in Rotterdam in 1904, Willem de Kooning studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts & Letters before immigrating to the United States in 1926. There he held teaching positions at Black Mountain and Yale, and was awarded the President’s Freedom Award Medal and a National Medal of the Arts. “The Figure: Movement and Gesture” precedes a major retrospective of de Kooning’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, and is accompanied by a catalogue introduced by the art historian Richard Shiff.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Willem de Kooning, via The Pace Gallery.
Willem de Kooning, “Hostess” (1973), via ArtDaily.
– R. Fogel
Related links:
Exhibition Page [The Pace Gallery]
“The Pace Gallery Presents Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture” [ArtDaily]
