In
March 2015 the Royal Academy of Arts will presenta survey of Richard
Diebenkorn’s figurative and abstract works to a UK audience for the first time
in almost twenty-five years. Celebrated as a post-war Master in his native
United States, the exhibition will serve as an opportunity to discover the importance
of Diebenkorn (1922-1993) within the canon of American painting.
Richard
Diebenkorn will be a focused exploration of the artist’s ever-changing, always
compelling career across four decades, shifting from the abstract to the
figurative in both painting and works on paper. The exhibition will comprise
over 50 works with significant loans from public and private collections in the
United States and Europe. Diebenkorn created an exceptional and consistently
intriguing body of work.
The
exhibition will reveal the vital role heplayed in the development of American
art, and will be arranged to reflect the three distinct periods of his work. During
the early stage of his career in the 1950s he gained recognition as a leading
abstract expressionist yet in 1955 he turned his attention to figurative
painting, considered at the time as a surprising and unfashionable shift,
although he achieved considerable success working in this genre.
In
1967, having relocated to Southern California from the San Fancisco Bay Area,
he returnedto abstract paintings and drawings beginning a second long and
highly successful period in this style. The exhibition will highlight his
staunch artistic independence and will show the ease of movement between styles,which
were hallmarks of his career.
The
first gallery will explore Diebenkorn’s early abstract work, produced for his
Museum of Fine Arts exhibition in Albuquerque, New Mexico and during a teaching
post that followed in Urbana, Illionois between 1950 and 1952, as well as the
earliest abstract works he produced in Berkeley, California.
The
second gallery will focus on works made during his return to figurative and
landscape studies in Berkeley, California between 1955 and 1966, when he became
known as a successful Bay Area Figurative artist.
The
last gallery will display his largest and perhaps most famous body of work, the
non-objective Ocean Park series created between 1967 and 1988 in Southern
California.
Diebenkorn
was strongly associated with California and the American West, where he lived
and worked for most of his life. The quintessential colourist, his sumptuous
palette and compositions reveal an exquisite sensitivity to his environment and
geography, capturing a sense of the light and space of the various locations in
which he worked.
For
Diebenkorn, each work was a search for ‘rightness’,
an attempt to solve complex and often self-imposed compositional and spatial
problems, so that each work becomes a perfectly balanced resolution.
Despite
his deserved recognition in the United States, Diebenkorn’s work has been less
widely exhibited in Europe. The only major solo exhibition was at the
Whitechapel Gallery in 1991 and he was elected an Honorary Academician in 1992,
shortly before his death in 1993,a testament to the level of esteem in which he
was held by fellow artists.
Richard Diebenkorn will demonstrate the variety and subtlety
of the artist’s oeuvre and the ease of his transition from abstraction to
figuration and back again, reinvigorating hisposition as a modern American Master.
Organisation
Richard Diebenkorn has been organised by the Royal
Academy of Arts, London. It will be guest curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, curator
of the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series (Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth, Orange County Museum of Art, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2011-12),
with Edith Devaney, Exhibition Curator at the Royal Academy. T
he
exhibition has the full co-operation of the Richard Diebenkorn family and
estate (including the artist’s widow Phyllis Diebenkorn), and the Richard
Diebenkorn Foundation.
Catalogue
The
exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with
contributions from Sarah C. Bancroft, Edith Devaney and Steven Nash.
Images:
All
works by Richard Diebenkorn. © 2014 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Berkeley
#5
,
1953. Oil on canvas, 134.6 x 134.6 cm. Private collection.
Albuquerque
#4
,
1951. Oil on canvas, 128.9 x 116.2 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Gift of Joseph
Pulitzer Jr.
Ocean
Park #116
,
1979. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 208.3 x 182.9 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, museum purchase, gift
of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis
Girl
On a Terrace
,
1956. Oil on canvas, 179.07 x 166.05 x 2.54 cm. Collection Neuberger Museum of
Art. Purchase College, State University of
New York. Gift of Roy R. Neuberger
Ocean
Park #27
,
1970. Oil on canvas, 254 x 203.2 cm. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of The Roebling
Society and Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Blatt and
Mr. and Mrs. William K. Jacobs, Jr., 72.4
Cityscape
#1
,
1963. Oil on canvas, 153 x 128.3 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Purchased with funds from Trustees and friends in
memory of Hector Escobosa, Brayton Wilbur, and J.D. Zellerbach
