Untitled

After relocating to a studio in East Hampton in 1963 de Kooning turned away from his Abstract Pastoral Landscapes and returned to depictions of the female figure. Oscillating between the figure and landscape throughout his oeuvre, de Kooning fused these polarities in the series of pastoral nudes he made during this period. In these works, the female form and landscape are coaxed to different degrees in a dialectic between abstraction and figuration with both often subsumed by the organic undulations and tactility of de Kooning's paint. Indeed, the artist's uninhibited handling of gestural tonality renders the body and nature in some kind of mutual meltdown. However, in the spring of 1975, he veered more decisively towards landscape abstractions with a spurt of large-scale, awe-inspiring canvases. Nature, which until then had laid relatively fallow in his imagination, resurfaced in these works in an explosive rush. An accumulation of sensations of earth, light, sea and sky became internalized and transfigured into the skin and muscle of paint.

Untitled of 1972 derives from between these two phases, although it appears closer in sensibility to the abstractions of 1975. A sensuous mixture of colour, lush texture and calligraphic curves the essentially abstract painterly forms occasionally transmute from their visceral gumminess into roiling nature and corporeal fleshiness. Featuring a luxurious palette and a restraint of broad, rollicking strokes, the work's rich claret interwoven with royal blue and intersected by white seduces the viewer with its painterly possibilities suggestive of the faint memory of the landscape and of the woman who once lounged in it. Untitled is an abstraction of such remembered experiences; it is also an analogy of nature and of the body. Capturing energy without beginning or end, the work seems to be simultaneously rising, falling, floating, flying or lying dormant like a distinct organic being.