Richard Diebenkorn RA

Revered as one of the great post-war masters in his native United States, Richard Diebenkorn is an artist whose staunchly independent career takes us from abstraction to figuration and back again.

We are thrilled to be finally bringing the work of a man described by the Washington Post as one of America’s “finest abstract painters” to a UK audience for the first time in more than 20 years. Diebenkorn’s career is broadly divided into three phases and we will be presenting some of the most outstanding works from each period.

We begin in the early 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was becoming a dominant force on the East Coast. Diebenkorn initially embraced abstraction, before making what was a surprising change of direction towards figurative work in the mid-1950s and 1960s. Then, returning to abstraction in the 1970s, we look at his famous Ocean Park series, which according to the Boston Globe includes “some of the most beautiful works of art created in America or anywhere else since the Second World War.”