Winter 2025 Issue
An upcoming exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings and works on paper at Gagosian, New York, kicks off the gallery’s representation of his foundation. The exhibition’s curator, Jasper Sharp, considers an untitled work on paper by the artist from c. 1970–88.
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, c. 1970–88, gouache and charcoal on joined paper, 14 × 25 ½ inches (35.6 × 64.8 cm) © 2025 Richard Diebenkorn Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, c. 1970–88, gouache and charcoal on joined paper, 14 × 25 ½ inches (35.6 × 64.8 cm) © 2025 Richard Diebenkorn Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
As 1970 began, Richard Diebenkorn could not have known that he was approaching the summit of his mature period as a painter. In 1966, already established as one of the leading American artists of his generation, he had moved with his wife, Phyllis, from Berkeley to Santa Monica to take up a position on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. There—first in his cramped studio above an appliance store, and later in a large studio space—he painted the first large-scale canvases in the Ocean Park series that would represent his enduring artistic legacy. By the late 1960s, he turned away from the figurative style that had defined the last decade of his work to make an almost total commitment to abstraction.
Like many of Diebenkorn’s other drawings and works on paper in this era, Untitled (c. 1970–88) is composed with charcoal and gouache that he diluted with water to produce an atmospheric, dappled effect on the work’s surface. That surface is made up of three sheets of paper pasted together, a technique that Diebenkorn often used as a way to test different compositional structures. And in a manner typical of his Ocean Park studies, the work is traversed by a scaffold of hand-drawn lines, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, many of them covered with a pale coat of paint. There is barely a square inch that does not appear to have been revised or reworked, creating a palimpsest of pentimenti that contributes to the air of uncertainty.
When a picture is right and complete there is a cumulative thrill in the sequential encounters with the parts until the work is completely (or as completely as possible) experienced.
Richard Diebenkorn
And yet, at the same time, Untitled stands alone within the group as the only work that retains an unequivocal figurative presence: a lone figure leaning forward in an armchair to contemplate an empty canvas on the other side of the room. The depiction bears little resemblance to Diebenkorn himself; rather, it could represent any painter who ever picked up a brush. It draws on a lineage of charged studio self-portraits leading back to Rembrandt, albeit with its own distinctly Beckettian character.
The date of c. 1970–88 ascribed to the work bookends virtually the entire two-decade span of the Ocean Park series and leaves unclear which elements were completed in which year. What is known is that the work remained pinned to the wall of Diebenkorn’s studio until his death, in 1993, a simple, essential reminder of the task at hand.
Richard Diebenkorn, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, November 8–December 20, 2025
Jasper Sharp is a British curator and writer based in Austria. Having begun his career at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, he later served as the curator for modern and contemporary art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Nuno Filipe Olivera
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