De Kooning’s Monumental Vision Reclaims Amsterdam
The Rijksmuseum opens its largest exhibition of Willem de Kooning in decades, gathering more than 120 works that chart the Abstract Expressionist master's restless evolution from disciplined drawing to gestural abstraction.
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Amsterdam holds the measure of a giant this winter. The Rijksmuseum opens its doors to more than 120 works by Willem de Kooning, the restless Dutch American who remade painting in the twentieth century, bending figuration and abstraction into something entirely his own. This is the largest survey of his work mounted in Europe in decades, and it moves with the unhurried confidence of a retrospective that knows its subject intimately.
The exhibition breathes through drawing first. De Kooning’s hand, whether moving across paper with ink or charcoal, or charged with oil across canvas, carried an almost musical intelligence; the lines do not describe so much as they insist, they argue with themselves, they move backward and forward simultaneously. To see his drawings gathered in volume is to understand the laboratory from which his paintings emerged, the constant negotiation between the figure and the abstract gesture that defined his entire practice.
Two of his most iconic paintings occupy the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour, that ceremonial heart reserved for works of profound consequence. “Excavation” from 1950 arrives with its characteristic denseness, a painting that seems to tunnel into itself, layers of colour and form colliding and resolving into something monumental. Alongside it, the museum holds space for paintings and sculptures that trace de Kooning’s intellectual ambitions across decades, each work a conversation with the one before it.
What emerges from walking these rooms is not a narrative of mastery achieved but of mastery constantly interrogated. De Kooning never settled. The women who appear in his work from the late 1940s onward embody this restlessness; they are neither fully figurative nor abstract, but something more unsettling, more human, more alive. A work like “Untitled (Three Women)” from 1948 shows three forms that shift between body and pure gesture, sensual and austere by turns.
Even his work in ceramics, pieces such as “Dish with Jugs” made in the early 1920s, carries this same urgent inquiry. Here is an artist who refused compartments, who understood that drawing could illuminate painting, that sculpture might offer new spatial logic, that the handmade gesture was always the point.
The exhibition runs through January 17, 2027.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
