Richard Diebenkorn: Still Life: 2nd Floor Gallery

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to present Still Life, a show of paintings and works on paper by the venerable American artist Richard Diebenkorn. This exhibition showcases 14 works from the Diebenkorn family collection that have never been for sale, highlighting the artist’s Berkeley period still lifes from 1956 to 1967.

 

Richard Diebenkorn's representational works during his Berkeley years demonstrate what curator and scholar Steven Nash described as the artist's "genuine allegiance to nature.”[1] Even in pursuit of abstraction, the paintings of European Masters such as Bonnard, Cézanne, and Matisse remained a true source of inspiration for Diebenkorn. In his paintings, everyday objects from his home and studio– a knife slicing into a tomato, a lit match warming the fingertips of the holding hand, a pair of scissors balancing on a coffee cup– their angles and shapes collide in a particular pause, pushing against the raw atmospheric force of the paint.

 

The quotidian objects are made extraordinary by the artist’s use of them as instruments of tension. An empty chair in solitude is not only abundant in its evocative capability and compact symbolism but also a multifaceted pictorial tool that reflects daylight and casts a shadow, adds gravity to the horizon, and fractures the balance of a rectangular picture plane. The environments that surround these objects are often spare in their description, becoming an infinite space within their intimate scale– one that offers the stage to the paint. Much like his abstract paintings, the information in the paint imbues emotion, and this collection of still lifes captures an incomplete stillness, the slow pacing of the molecules.