During his nearly 60-year career, de Kooning was known to periodically reinvent his style of painting. He created a stir in the 1950s when he turned away from pure abstraction, which by then had reached critical acclaim, to paint figures, producing his monumental Women series. His paintings of the 1960s and 1970s alternated in subject matter between the landscape and the figure, and were characterized by their heavily painted surfaces, bold brush strokes, and richly variegated colors.

In 1980, at the age of 76, de Kooning again shifted to a new mode of painting. The density of his previous canvases gave way to a series of large-scale works displaying open forms, spare surfaces, and a sharply reduced palette concentrating in the primary colors--red, yellow, and blue--at times complemented with subtle tones of green, violet, and orange. Color, light, and the weave of forms across and against the surface of these works absorb the viewer's attention; while the paintings remain resolutely abstract, allusions to both the human body and pastoral landscape are present in equal measure.

This exhibition contains works made between 1981 and 1987. In 1989 de Kooning was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and in 1990, at the age of 86, he ceased to paint. Despite various debates that have been launched concerning the nature of aging as it impacts the creative process, exhibition curator Gary Garrels asserts that de Kooning's 1980s paintings are of particular interest in light of larger stylistic issues in late work of artists such as Titian, Monet, or Matisse, who worked to an advanced age; and that they "are among the most beautiful, sensual, and exuberant abstract works by any modern painter." De Kooning's late paintings have been collected by many individuals and museums and have been widely hailed by critics as an extraordinary body of work-reaffirming an artistic achievement that has left its mark indelibly on the history of modern painting.