Willem de Kooning
dal 24/9/2008 al 7/11/2008
Segnalato da
24/9/2008
Willem de Kooning
Xavier Hufkens, Bruxelles
The exhibition is comprised of works in several media, including ink, charcoal and oil. These works on paper reveal his turbulent gestural style, the ways in which he extensively reworked his drawings and paintings, and his ability to leave a quick, but meaningful, synoptic glyph, as it were.
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) is one of the most important artists of the 20th
century. His paintings strive towards direct expression by focusing on the act of
painting itself. His canvases stand on the border between deliberate composition and
free gesture. De Kooning is well known for paintings of the female figure that
transcend traditional figurative and abstract categories and break up conventional
aesthetic frames of reference by maximizing the expressive power of paint in line
and color. While de Kooning's work captures the speed of paint strokes on canvas,
paradoxically, he was known at times to spent months completing a single work. A
subtlety and depth resides in the flat plane of his paintings, which transfixes the
onlooker. The work of Willem de Kooning represents in a superb manner, the act of
making.
The exhibition Willem de Kooning. Works on paper is comprised of works in several
media, including ink, charcoal and oil. These works on paper reveal his turbulent
gestural style, the ways in which he extensively reworked his drawings and
paintings, and his ability to leave a quick, but meaningful, synoptic glyph, as it
were. They show de Kooning as a virtuoso artist, who persisted in producing
innovative work.
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904. After formal art training, he
emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he became part of the New York art
scene. His first solo exhibition held in 1948, was comprised exclusively of black
and white abstract works. These paintings were received with critical acclaim and
launched his career. A lifetime of international exhibitions followed. Numerous
museums have held retrospectives of his work, amongst others, the Museum of Modern
Art (1968), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1983) and the National Gallery of
Art, Washington DC (1994). In 1995, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised
the first large exhibition of his paintings from the 1980s. More recent exhibitions
include Willem de Kooning: Late Paintings (2006), which opened in the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg before travelling to the Carlo Bilotti Museum,
Rome.
A catalogue, including a text by Robert Pincus-Witten, will accompany the exhibition.
Opening Thursday 25 September, 6 to 9 pm
Xavier Hufkens
rue Saint-Georges 6-8 - Brussels
Free admission