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Artist: Elaine de Kooning
Berry Campbell presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Abstract Expressionist and portraitist Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989), spanning four decades of her career from 1948 to 1988. The exhibition is the first major solo presentation of de Kooning’s work since the National Portrait Gallery’s 2015–2016 exhibition, Elaine de Kooning: Portraits, continuing the critical reassessment of her work and her enduring contributions to art history. Many of these rarely seen works are on display for the first time since the artist’s death in 1989, highlighting the breadth of de Kooning’s practice across abstraction, representation, and portraiture.
In the 1940s and 1950s, de Kooning became a vital figure of the New York School and one of the most celebrated of the “Ninth Street Women,” developing a distinctive style characterized by energetic brushwork that bridged figuration and abstraction. A charter member of the 8th Street Club (The Club), de Kooning was among the eleven women who participated in the seminal 1951 Ninth Street Show. Alongside her work as an artist, she was an accomplished writer, serving as a celebrated art critic for ARTnews, where she helped introduce Abstract Expressionism to wider audiences while championing many of its leading artists.
Underscoring her lifelong practice of painting, the exhibition ranges from her early abstractions to her celebrated portraits of family, friends, and fellow artists, to her dynamic, expressive portrayals of sporting events. Central to the exhibition is California (1958–1960), Elaine de Kooning’s monumental 11-foot-wide oil painting and one of the largest abstractions she ever created. This important painting was in her traveling museum retrospective, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art in 1992.
Although de Kooning experimented with a range of subjects, portraiture remained a constant throughout her career, redefining modern figuration by merging the subject with the gestural, visceral brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. Notable examples of her portraits will be on view, including works from her famous John F. Kennedy series, created during her 1962 commission for an official presidential portrait for the Harry S. Truman Library. Other subjects feature artist Alex Katz (Alex Katz II, 1967), de Kooning’s artist friend Aristodemos Kaldis (Kaldis #12, 1978), an influential member of the 8th Street Club, and artist Toni Ross (Toni #2 (Toni Ross), 1982), whom de Kooning mentored early in her career.
Beyond portraiture and abstraction, de Kooning maintained a lifelong fascination with movement, evident in her notable depictions of Bacchus, inspired by the 19th-century bronze sculpture The Triumph of Silenus by Jules Dalou in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, and in her portrayals of action-filled sporting events. The exhibition will feature Bacchus #20-G (1983), one of her most important large-scale examples of the subject, embodying her unique capacity to capture energetic twisting and turning on the canvas, along with Scrimmage (Basketball #3) (1948), an early example of her fascination with athletic motion.
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