Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York
April 15 to July 11, 2025
In spring–summer 2025, Gagosian’s Chelsea space at 555 West 24th Street reopened with “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting,” curated by Cecilia Alemani (High Line Art). The exhibition ran from April 15 and was extended through July 11, 2025.
Although frequently described as “retrospective-like,” it was more accurately a deliberately edited, museum-caliber survey: 24 works spanning 1944–1986, installed across the gallery’s rooms in a way that encouraged viewers to read de Kooning’s career as recursive rather than linear. (The show’s checklist numbers 24 objects, including two bronzes and 22 paintings; this “distillation” was part of its point.)
What made the show feel unusually “retrospective” for a commercial gallery wasn’t only the historical range, but also its curatorial thesis and its institutional muscle. Alemani and Gagosian secured significant museum loans—most prominently MoMA’s “Untitled V” (1982) and the Guggenheim’s “…Whose Name Was Writ in Water” (1975).
The title “Endless Painting” functions as both description and argument. In the supporting materials around the show, the phrase is explicitly linked to de Kooning’s “ever-evolving” pictorial language and to his oft-cited habit of stopping rather than finishing—“just stop”—a stance that frames revision, scraping-back, and perpetual re-beginning as the medium’s true subject.
Alemani’s key curatorial move was to reject a strictly chronological narrative in favor of what she described (in preview coverage) as an exhibition that “skips and jumps” and “creates rhymes” across decades. In practical terms, this meant engineering sightlines and adjacencies that made repetition legible: a 1940s work could “echo” a late ribbon painting; an iconic mid-career figure could be made to reverberate against a near-abstract contour from the 1980s.
This is where the exhibition’s interpretive strength was most apparent. De Kooning’s most familiar art-historical headline, his oscillation between figuration and abstraction, can harden into a simplistic binary: “Women” versus “abstract landscapes” versus “late ribbons.” “Endless Painting” tried to dissolve that story by showing the figure as a kind of durable pressure within the paint, even when the image looks, at first glance, nonrepresentational. Gagosian’s own exhibition text makes this explicit, describing how Alemani placed late works like “Untitled V” (1982), “Untitled XIX” (1984), and “Untitled XIV” (1986) among earlier works in order to foreground recurring motifs-read as elbows, knees, mouths, eyes-traceable back to the artist’s 1930s–40s vocabulary of Cubism- and Surrealism-inflected forms.
Several works and pairings made the thesis concrete. The exhibition text itself points to “Montauk II” (1969), where flesh-toned biomorphic shapes flicker in and out of focus, and to “…Whose Name Was Writ in Water” (1975), where profiles and limb-like traces appear amid brushwork that never fully stabilizes into either figure or ground. In “Untitled XIV” (1986), the “undulating arms” are presented as a late-career intensification of this bodily inference-gestures that can be read simultaneously as pure contour and as a dispersed anatomy.
The two bronzes were not side-notes. “Clamdigger” (1972) and the monumental “Standing Figure” (1969–84) were integrated as a kind of three-dimensional punctuation, with “Standing Figure” emphasized as being shown indoors for the first time in nearly three decades. Alemani described the indoor encounter as deliberately corporeal—“sensual and physical”—arguing that the sculpture, precisely because it was “meant for outdoors,” changes the temperature of the rooms and sharpens the viewer’s awareness of scale, weight, and the body’s relation to painted marks.
The exhibition’s timeline, meanwhile, was curated to make de Kooning’s shifts feel less like “periods” and more like recurring states of pressure. A New York Times “Newly Reviewed” piece (circulated as a PDF via Gagosian’s press materials) describes the show as “intriguingly selective,” with only 24 works across three rooms, moving from the precarious 1940s through later decades, and distributing 1970s–80s works throughout to jolt viewers into noticing recurring marks. That same review lingers on the mid-1970s as a moment of particular force (“Untitled I,” 1976, is singled out), while treating “Untitled V” (1982) as a work that registers struggle rather than stylistic decline.
This brings us to the show’s most sensitive art-historical terrain: the 1980s paintings, produced as de Kooning’s health issues emerged and as debates about late style, quality, authorship anxieties, and the interpretive weight of biography, have persisted for decades. In reporting around the exhibition, Alemani explicitly positioned the late work as continuous with earlier concerns, even as it became controversial for some viewers; she argued that the same “struggle with the human form” and the same transfer-and-revision techniques can be tracked from early work through the last paintings on view.
