Echo Wall (Cave #68)

A dazzling polyphony of color and space where horses, bison, and elk roam in horizonless profiles, Echo Wall (Cave #68) (1986/1988) reveals Elaine de Kooning’s genius for sustaining depiction, evocation and abstraction simultaneously. Exhibited three times in 1987 as the second panel of a diptych (Calcium Wall, 1986), the present work was returned to the artist’s studio after its national tour and set free from a dichotomous past. Its creatures range distant and near, fissured, striated and creviced, as though transfused by scars of time, underscoring the artist’s skill in multi-spatial juxtaposition. And, like her paleolithic predecessors, Elaine de Kooning brought her own light into the caves: rejecting torchlight and underground darkness, Echo Wall echoes poetic light—sunless yet radiant, crystalline, opalescent, diaphanous, refractive—with the immediacy of a lightning bolt.

—Edvard Lieber, 2021