Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum will stage the largest European retrospective of Willem de Kooning in more than four decades when its new survey opens on 9 October 2026 and continues through 17 January 2027. Titled "Willem de Kooning at Work," the exhibition gathers more than 120 paintings and drawings spanning from the 1940s to the early 1980s, tracing a career that moved restlessly between figuration and abstraction. The date carries deliberate symbolic weight: 2026 marks the centenary of the Dutch-born painter's 1926 departure from Rotterdam for the United States by sea, the journey that led him to New York and later East Hampton and to a central role in abstract expressionism. The show is organised in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Willem de Kooning Foundation, and it has been assembled by the Rijksmuseum's head of contemporary art, Marta Gwinner. Among the key loans are Excavation (1950), the monumental canvas widely regarded as the high point of de Kooning's gestural abstraction, together with earlier works such as Pink Angels (1945) and Abstraction (1949-50). A notable pairing sees Woman I (1950-52) and Woman and Bicycle (1952-53), the first and third canvases of his famous Woman series, installed together in the museum's Gallery of Honour. It is the first time the two paintings have been shown side by side in Amsterdam since 1968. The exhibition continues the Rijksmuseum's recent strategy of mounting ambitious twentieth-century surveys alongside its historic holdings, and its scale signals a renewed institutional interest in an artist whose market and critical standing have long rested on his American years. For Dutch audiences, the framing is pointedly biographical: de Kooning returns, in a sense, to the country he left as a young man, presented as both an American master and a Rotterdam emigrant whose career bridged two continents.