Excavation

A dense, all-over web of hooked and curving shapes in creamy whites, ochres, and flickers of color fills the large canvas edge to edge, glimpses of teeth, jaws, and bodies surfacing within the churning mass. Willem de Kooning built Excavation as a teeming field with no center and no rest, figuration and abstraction held in restless tension. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, it is widely considered his masterpiece - a major monument of Abstract Expressionism, the whole surface alive with interlocking forms that seem perpetually to assemble and dissolve, raw energy organized into shimmering complexity.