Excavation

This is a very large oil painting, about two metres high and two and a half metres wide, so it fills your view as you stand before it. At first it may look like a tangle of lines and shapes with no clear subject. Look at the whole surface and notice how the shapes seem to slide against and overlap one another, like flat panels shifting past each other. Their edges are often left open rather than closed off. It is an abstract painting, meaning it does not set out to show a scene in the way a photograph would.

Move closer and let your eye follow the hooked, curling lines that run across the canvas. They are drawn like handwriting, with sweeping strokes. Within them you can start to find parts of bodies: noses, eyes, teeth, necks and jaws. Look too for shapes that resemble birds and fish. None of these sit still. They seem to dance across the surface, appearing and then dissolving back into pure paint as you look. Try scanning slowly from one side of the canvas to the other and see how many you can pick out.

Willem de Kooning, who was born in the Netherlands and worked in the United States, finished this painting in June 1950, just in time for it to be shown at the twenty-fifth Venice Biennale, a large international art exhibition. It was his largest painting up to that point. He said it began from an image of women working in a rice field in Bitter Rice, a 1949 Italian film directed by Giuseppe de Santis. His method was to build up thick layers of paint and then scrape them down again, often over months, until he was satisfied.

De Kooning was a central figure in Abstract Expressionism, a movement that treated the physical act of painting as a sign of the artist's emotions. This work shows the tension at the heart of his art, which hovers between abstraction and recognisable figures. The title suits it well. Like an excavation, the surface feels dug into, with layers added and removed. Before you leave, look again at the places where the paint seems thickest or most scraped, and imagine the many layers that lie beneath what you can see.