An “almost” unpublished work by Kooning at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice

Willem de Kooning arrived in Italy in 1959, a moment of great success for the artist who, since he left Rotterdam for the United States at the age of twenty-two, had not returned to Europe. What had he done in these years? He had earned a reputation as an artist of exceptional ability and great professionalism, becoming one of the most important and influential painters of his generation.

The exhibition, which can be visited until 15 September 2024, is the first exhibition project that analyzes the two periods that de Kooning spent in Italy, in 1959 and 1969, and the profound impact they had on his work, bringing together approximately 75 works.

Returning to his relationship with our country, the theme around which the exhibition revolves, the first trip to Venice and Rome lasted less than a week, but de Kooning was so fascinated by the Italian capital that he returned only a few weeks later. «New York, which had seemed so grandiose to me, seemed cramped after Rome», he said during an interview in Italy, «in my study on Tenth Street I kept repeating to myself: better to return to Rome». And it was ten years later, in the summer of 1969, that he returned to Italy as a guest of the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, spending most of his time in Rome. Here a chance meeting with an old friend leads him to experiment with a new technique for the first time: sculpture.

The curators Gary Garrels And Mario Codognato have explored, as never before, the Italian influence on de Kooning’s subsequent paintings, drawings and sculptures in America. An exhibition that is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Italy since he was invited to the Venice Biennale 70 years ago.

«I remember everything half suspended or projected in space; the paintings seem to work from whatever angle you choose to look at them. The whole secret is to free yourself from the force of gravity.” An almost prophetic comment on the outcome achieved in his paintings of the 1980s and in the other experiments attempted after his first visit to Italy.

As he explains Mario Codognato, curator and director of the Anish Kapoor Foundation and the Berggruen Arts and Culture in Venice, «Staying within the history of art while looking for a way out is conceptual damnation and the most coveted prize for the modern artist. Willem de Kooning, one of the greatest protagonists of American art of the last century, perfectly embodies this aspiration.”

And it is precisely this aspiration that we see in the room dedicated entirely to sculpture, populated by thirteen small bronzes created by de Kooning in Rome. The works are the result of the artist’s first experiments with clay which, between 1972 and 1974, once he returned to New York, led him to produce a new group of sculptures. The works dialogue with the figurative paintings painted in the same period, hanging on the walls, alongside grandiose abstract paintings created subsequently from 1975 to 1977.

An exhibition that finds its strength in the dialogue between painting and sculpture with drawings from the sixties and seventies: among the most important works there are four ink drawings made by de Kooning in Spoleto in 1969, presented alongside a complementary selection of intimate, gestural drawings, conceptually related to the sculptures. In fact, they are the drawings relating to the period in which de Kooning fragments the figure, leaving empty spaces to act as a counterbalance to his vigorous lines.

A great research work that was possible thanks to The Willem de Kooning Foundation, a private foundation that manages the artist’s assets and promotes the study and valorization of his life and work through research, exhibitions and educational programs. «This exhibition offers us the extraordinary opportunity to present new research and insights that will enrich the experience of thousands of national and international visitors. De Kooning is one of America’s great innovators and, as such, we believe his history of constant challenge is a vital inspiration to many contemporary artists, students and young people.”