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Richard Diebenkorn

Ocean Park Paintings

February 18 – March 20, 1999

Richard Diebenkorn

Solo exhibition

These luminous works were named by the artist the Ocean Park series after the section in Santa Monica where his studio was located. In these works, Diebenkorn shows his range of palette, his interest in light and surface as well as the study of open and closed form.
A hallmark of the Ocean Park paintings is that each one creates its own, self-contained chromatic universe. The Ocean Park series represents some of the most significant accomplishments of Diebenkorn’s career and are among the major contributions of the recent past to contemporary American painting.

Among the works featured in the exhibition include 9 paintings and 8 works on paper, painted between 1968 and 1985. Diebenkorn began his prized Ocean Park series at the end of 1967 and continued to develop it throughout the rest of his career. For three years, he painted exclusively on canvas, while the Ocean Park works on paper followed in 1970.

In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a highly acclaimed Diebenkorn retrospective, the most comprehensive survey of his work, which then traveled to the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Art among others. In 1976, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY organized the first full-scale retrospective on Diebenkorn’s work, which was also presented at the Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Washington, DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.