© Adagp, Paris
"I have to change to stay the same."
The Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning is a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism. In his work, the artist seeks new uses for colours with the ultimate goal of eliciting "pure emotion". Though his paintings are landscapes, they tend towards abstraction in an intense struggle with nature. The brush is let loose. The reality of these works, then, is that they make the active pictorial process more visible. If the artist’s canvases of the 1960s carry an air of serenity with their pastel tones, suffused with the passage of light, those which emerged between 1975 and 1980 possess, in constrast, explosive potential and willing fluidity by way of their decisively unfinished forms.