A major exhibition exploring Willem de Kooning’s passion for Italy is due to open next year in Venice, coinciding with the Biennial 2024. The exhibition, organized in partnership with the New York-based Willem de Kooning Foundation, will take place at the Gallerie dell’Accademia from April 16 to September 15.
According to a press release from the gallery, the exhibition will be the first to explore the impact of De Kooning’s two stays in Italy, in 1959 and 1969, on his work. “The art he created in Italy and the influence of Italy on his later paintings, drawings and sculptures in America have never been fully explored,” the statement added.
The impact of his time in Italy is examined in works dating from the late 1950s to the 1980s. The exhibition is curated by Gary Garrels, who resigned from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2020, and Mario Codognato, director of the Anish Kapoor Foundation.
According to the website of the Willem de Kooning Foundation, in 1959 the artist was in Rome, in the studio of Afro Basaldella, and “painted experimental black and white works on paper known as Romeand “met Alberto Burri and Cy Twombly”. In 1969, he “travelled to Spoleto and Rome. In Rome, [he] modeled his first 13 clay sculptures at the foundry of sculptor and friend Herzl Emanuel, who cast and cast them in bronze.
Previous major exhibitions by De Kooning include a traveling retrospective shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London from 1994 to 1995. In our article collecting reviews from critics for the showwe noted that “the inclusion of works from all stages of his career is considered by some critics to have exposed the weaknesses of the images created by the artist during the last eight or nine years of his professional life”.
The artist’s auction record stands at $68.9 million (with fees), the price paid for The woman as landscape (circa 1954) at Christie’s New York in 2018. Last year, the work Untitled (circa 1979) fetched $34.8 million at Sotheby’s New York. The Dutch-American artist, closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, died in 1997.
