Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce Richard Diebenkorn: Faces and Figures on view from May 2 to June 28, 2024 at the gallery’s 1907 townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the exhibition includes a sweep of taut, psychologically complex portraits made during the distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker’s mature representational period, an output that Jane Livingston, writing in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, remarks “exceeds in number that of almost every other group of drawings and paintings he made, even in the prolific Ocean Park period.” The artist has been represented by Van Doren Waxter since its founding 25 years ago in 1999, with the gallery’s inaugural exhibition devoted to his paintings from his epic Ocean Park cycle. The presentation includes seven paintings and fourteen works on paper made by the artist between 1955 and 1967, including a rare acrylic painted on a 1964 poster promoting the artist's drawing exhibition at Stanford University Art Gallery that year. A must-see for aficionados of Richard Diebenkorn, the show marks the first time his rarely seen Two Nudes, 1960—a beguiling, seven foot tall oil that anticipates the scale of the monumental Ocean Park abstractions he would begin in 1967—has been on view in 60 years. “A meandering blue background,” enthuses art historian Stephanie Lebas Huber in the show’s accompanying essay, “sculpts the figural pair by cutting into the flesh-tones with layers of blue, in some cases even defining their bodies with a contour line of the same hue.” Huber writes that Henri Matisse’s “long-standing influence over Diebenkorn’s color palette and subject matter is evident,” noting that he began looking at the painter in the 1940s during trips to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and had viewed a 1952 Matisse retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art that included his hero’s coloristic Male Model, c. 1900 and the sublime The Dance, 1909.