One hundred years after a teenage Willem de Kooning stowed away on a freighter leaving Rotterdam for New York, the Rijksmuseum has brought his work home to Amsterdam. "Willem de Kooning at work," which opened on 9 October 2026 and runs until 17 January 2027, is the largest European exhibition devoted to the artist in more than four decades. Assembled with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Willem de Kooning Foundation, the presentation gathers over 120 drawings, paintings and sculptures and puts drawing — usually treated as mere preparation — at the very centre of the story. Across more than sixty-five years, from early student sheets to swift late charcoals, visitors follow a painter who sketched, erased, collaged and reinvented himself without pause. His own motto ran through the rooms: "I have to change to stay the same." The hang mixes seldom-lent works on paper from private collections with paintings and sculptures that made his name: Excavation of 1950 from the Art Institute of Chicago, Pink Angels of around 1945, Abstraction of 1949–50 from the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Woman of 1983 from Museum Ludwig. Two icons, Woman I and Woman and Bicycle, hang concurrently in the Gallery of Honour, placing de Kooning among the Dutch masters he studied — Rembrandt and Van Gogh — whose handling of light and line he admired. Curator Marian Cousijn argues that for de Kooning abstraction was never absolute; the human figure, often the female body, keeps resurfacing in his work. Director Taco Dibbits calls the show both a discovery and a homecoming — and for a Dutch audience that doubleness lands: an Abstract Expressionist who never stopped looking at the old masters has finally joined them in the museum of Rembrandt. A catalogue of new research and drawing workshops in the museum's Teekenschool accompany the exhibition.