Matthew Marks Gallery

As Peter Schjeldahl explains in the essay commissioned for this catalogue, de Kooning’s art is “a phenomenon forever unfolding between inexplicable beginnings and inconceivable ends.” The ninety-nine plates comprise eighty-three drawings and sixteen sculptures, all made between the years 1960 and 1980. Among the sculptures is the original plaster of Clamdigger (1970), the artist’s best known bronze. Each of the drawings, whether executed in charcoal, ink, gouache, or oil, offers what Schjeldahl calls “an adventure in draftsmanship whose every mark is like a sound that breaks a silence.”