Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure presents approximately eighty works on paper from between 1938 and 1955 highlighting the artist’s experiments with abstracting the female form. One of the most important artists of the New York School, de Kooning foregrounded process, layering, and texture in his heavily worked paintings, dissembling the boundaries between drawing and painting, abstraction and representation, figure and ground. The Women series, among de Kooning’s best known works, uses the imagery of female bodies to negotiate these tensions.
Tracing the Figure exhibits drawings related to the Women and more broadly to the theme of abstracted figuration. One of the earliest works in the show, a portrait of the artist’s wife (c. 1940–41), borrows a technique from historic painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in which certain parts of the body are rendered more finely than others. Further experiments with methods of abstraction produced Pink Lady (Study) (c. 1948), which incorporates fragments of de Kooning’s earlier, abstract work to produce a new female form. Drawings from the early 1950s, constituting the bulk of the exhibition, represent the artist’s mature approach to the Woman theme, such as in Two Women with Still Life (1952), from MOCA’s permanent collection.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure is organized by Connie Butler, Curator, and Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.