Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein - New York - exhibition - Brief Article

This beautifully curated pairing of Willem de Kooning's paintings and John Chamberlain's sculptures at PaceWildenstein pointed up the power of that underused (and nicely didactic) format, the two-person exhibition. Although the show is subtitled "Influence and Transformation," the issue of influence is problematic: while Chamberlain, nearly 25 years de Kooning's junior, shared the painter's action-oriented Abstract Expressionist ethos, he was scarcely an acolyte. What the exhibition did make abundantly clear, though, is that from the late '50s on de Kooning and Chamberlain were exploring similar terrain, and in doing so their art intersected in surprising ways. The great pleasure of this exhibition lay in its ability to set up a nuanced interplay of formal readings. In an age of insistent iconography, it is a relief to be able to simply savor the workings--at the highest level--of line, plane, surface, color, gesture, mass and material.

The two artists reveal much about each other. While Chamberlain's use of color has for years put him at the forefront of painterly sculptors, the juxtaposition of his work with de Kooning's reminds us of just how sculptural the latter can be. With their outscaled gestural scaffoldings set in an atmospheric welter of bold brushwork, paintings like Palisade (1957) and Door to the River (1960), evoke, by their physical presence, visual weight and a suggestion of perspectival depth, a clear three-dimensionality. Seeing, for example, the battered and roughly cut planes of Chamberlain's Swannanoa/ Swannanoa II (1959/74) next to Palisade made one aware of how similarly de Kooning's structure is poised, canted yet stable, in space. (The correspondence of the yellow and blue element on the left wing of the Chamberlain with the similarly colored strokes of the de Kooning was a particularly nice curatorial touch.)

If the exhibition underscored the contrapuntal relationship of the sculptural to the painterly in de Kooning's work, then seeing his paintings alongside Chamberlain's pieces altered the way we look at the sculptures as well. Their materiality seems to fall away, and they achieve an unexpected pictorialness. The sullied blues and pinked cadmium reds of de Kooning's Untitled XIV--one of his great 1976 pictures--are paralleled by the consonant hues of the metal pieces in Chamberlain's Haute Cinq (1990), the crumpling of the steel in space feeling remarkably like the workings of de Kooning's brush describing space. The whitened airiness in de Kooning's late pictures, with their long, looping strokes, finds a correspondence in Chamberlain's white sculptures of the late `80s. Daddy in the Dark (1988) is over 9 feet high, but its bulk is tempered by handlelike curls at its middle and a quality of the drawn figure that it shares with paintings like de Kooning's Untitled VIII (1985) or Untitled of the same year. The ribbon-like nature of the lines in de Kooning's late works is also echoed in the painted strips (as opposed to planes) that made up many of Chamberlain's works of the '90s.

The show's de Koonings and Chamberlains are consciously worked and dense structures--even de Kooning's seemingly thinner late paintings reveal a rich layering of pentimenti. The thrust and jostle of elements both resolve dynamics within the individual works and lead outward into the world. This exhibition fully exploited the potential for encounter and response that such a push beyond the frame promises.

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