In the late 1940s, even as De Kooning returned to figuration, he embarked on creating another abstraction, Excavation. While not as monumental as some later Abstract Expressionist paintings, the canvas was the biggest painting he had ever made, measuring just over six-and-a-half-feet tall and eight-feet wide. The pictorial space depicted in the painting was closely tied to De Kooning's sense of space in the physical world. As he explained in a talk he wrote for the Artists' Club, "If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter." In essence, his canvases were born at the fullest extension of his arms, where his fingers held the brush that touched the canvas. To go beyond this scale would risk losing the human intimacy of the space.

Most of the canvas is covered in shapes of dirty white, cream, and yellow, outlined with black and gray lines. Throughout the canvas, there are passages of various colors, such as crimson, blue, magenta, gold, and aqua. This results in an all-over composition with no specific point of entry, causing the viewer's eyes to move across the entire canvas. No single section stands out as more or less interesting than another. However, one can discern a ground line at the bottom edge of the painting and a rectangle that resembles a door or window. While the composition seems to extend beyond the edges of the canvas, De Kooning brings the viewer back to a threshold, suggesting a particular place and time, grounding them in the present. Harold Rosenberg described the painting as "a classical painting, majestic and distant, like a formula wrung out of testing explosives," suggesting that it was a masterpiece that De Kooning had worked his way into and closed the door behind him.