RICHARD DIEBENKORN
GAGOSIAN is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Richard Diebenkorn at 980 Madison Avenue in New York, opening on November 8, 2025.
November 08 – December 20, 2025
Organized in partnership with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and curated by Jasper Sharp, the exhibition inaugurates Gagosian’s representation of Diebenkorn. This marks a return of the distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker’s work to the location, as the gallery presented eleven Ocean Park paintings there from November 1992 to January 1993—the artist’s final exhibition of paintings before his death in March 1993.
Working for almost all his life in California, Diebenkorn pursued a distinctive career, beginning as an Abstract Expressionist, developing a unique approach to figuration in the mid-1950s, and a decade later returning to abstraction with the masterful Ocean Park series (1967–88). The interchange between abstraction and figuration that took place over the course of his career is an essential aspect of his achievement. In an era when a single direction defined many artists’ production, Diebenkorn moved fluidly across modalities and embraced an active approach to composition and revision, often retaining traces of a work’s process and creation—what the artist referred to as a picture “sitting right.”
The exhibition features six decades of the artist’s works on paper and paintings from every period, emphasizing continuity and variation. The works on view include a striking range of examples from across Diebenkorn’s career, including a 1943 watercolor that reflects the influence of Edward Hopper and Paul Cezanne, paintings from his Abstract Expressionist years, a rarely seen monumental 1960 canvas of nudes that exemplifies his long-term engagement with Henri Matisse and anticipates the scale of the epic Ocean Park cycle, and selections from his final decade that provide insights into his working practice.
Diebenkorn’s drawings and paintings on paper, using ink, graphite, charcoal, collage, gouache, oil, and acrylic evince the artist’s love of both mark making and using paper as a substrate. The sweep of this work reveals a vigorous experimentation with forms and subjects, from the rigid geometry of a 1975 ink and gouache Ocean Park sheet, to an intricate and luminous c. 1988 mixed-media work on joined poster board; from a c. 1988–91 gouache in which he maximized the simplicity of a flat brush’s rectilinear stroke against a creamy, coated surface, to a vertical work made late in life on which he used charcoal to layer foliage-inspired lines over a modified grid. Esteemed Diebenkorn scholar John Elderfield, who began visiting the artist at his home in 1985 prior to curating The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1988–89), referred to his “thinking in drawing” that “allows him access to what he intended.”