.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
By the 1980s, Richard Diebenkorn has experienced international acclaim, having exhibited widely in the United States as well as representing the American pavilion at the Venice Bieannale in 1978. He created Untitled in his Santa Monica studio near a beach known as Ocean Park. After immersing himself solely in figuration during the 1950s and early 1960s, Diebenkorn began to experiment with abstraction in a whole new manner. The Ocean Park series of paintings and drawings move towards a linear composition with layerings of acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, and graphite. In these works Diebenkorn created harmony with structure, causing complex relationships between rectangular forms. In its organic linear composition of stacked rectangular forms, Untitled enters a dialogue with Pier Mondrian's works. Both artists seem to revel in the use of primary colors and definitive lines that dictate both rigid order and poetic balance.
"...the works from Ocean Park allude to the broad 'surround,' as Diebenkorn once described it to me, of the observable world. Nature is transformed into art by being envisioned in symbolic forms, which operate within the conditions of the medium by analogy or equivalence to the natural world." (R. Newlin, "The Ocean Park Drawings," Richard Diebenkorn: Works on paper, Houston, 1987, p. 10.)
This work will be included in the forthcoming Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné under estate number 288.
"...the works from Ocean Park allude to the broad 'surround,' as Diebenkorn once described it to me, of the observable world. Nature is transformed into art by being envisioned in symbolic forms, which operate within the conditions of the medium by analogy or equivalence to the natural world." (R. Newlin, "The Ocean Park Drawings," Richard Diebenkorn: Works on paper, Houston, 1987, p. 10.)
This work will be included in the forthcoming Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné under estate number 288.