Interchange (de Kooning)
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| Artist | Willem de Kooning |
| Year | 1955 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 200.7 cm × 175.3 cm (79.0 in × 69.0 in) |
| Location | Private collection of Kenneth C. Griffin. Currently loaned to and displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago. |
Interchange, also known as Interchanged, is an oil on canvas painting by the Dutch-American abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). It measures 200.7 by 175.3 centimetres (79.0 by 69.0 in) and was completed in 1955. It was one of de Kooning's first abstract landscapes, and marked a change in his style under the influence of fellow artist Franz Kline. In September 2015, it was sold by the David Geffen Foundation to Kenneth C. Griffin for $300 million ($309.7 million today), a new mark for highest ever price for a painting, not surpassed until November 2017. It has been on loan at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The completion of the oil painting titled Interchange occurred in 1955 in a decade within which de Kooning had concentrated much of the early part of the 1950s reworking abstract figure study works of the female figure which he started in 1948. These were associated with his solo exhibition in 1953 which was called Paintings on the Theme of the Woman which opened in New York City that year. Some of the titles for these works were associated with various states of Woman I, Woman III and Woman, as well as Two Standing Women. By 1955, de Kooning had moved away from the human form and continued with the abstract rendering of the architecture and communities of his surroundings in downtown New York. The titles of some of de Kooning's 1955 oil paintings prominent at that time were Police Gazette, Composition, Gotham News, Saturday Night, and Easter Monday. During 1956, de Kooning had rendered The Time of Fire in the year after Interchange was completed. As de Kooning stated regarding his penchant for naming his oil works during this period of time, "I feel more at home (in) downtown New York that I would feel ... living on Park Avenue. This has no social comment. It is just that the streets are so goddamn quiet. I mean you can find nothing. Maybe it has something to do with my upbringing, I don't know, but I am in the sight of the average man. I (will) not go up to my studio in a Cadillac." His preferences for the selection of names for his oil paintings appeared to correspond to references to the neighborhood where he was living at that time in downtown New York, for example, Interchange.
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