Dimensions: image: 277 x 200 mm
Copyright: © The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Looking at this print, #4 by Richard Diebenkorn, it feels like a landscape remembered in fragments, a dream half-forgotten. Editor: For me, it’s the process that grips me—the starkness, the almost brutal etching into the plate. You can feel the artist's hand, the labor of pulling this image from the matrix. Curator: Yes, there's a raw honesty in those etched lines. The way he leaves space, lets the paper breathe, it’s like a conversation between what’s there and what’s not. A bit like a stripped-down map, maybe, or the bare bones of a building. Editor: It’s fascinating to think about the materiality, the zinc or copper plate, the acid bath, the press itself. These are the silent partners in creating this seemingly simple image. Curator: I hadn't thought of the collaboration as extending to the materials themselves... Now I find my view subtly reshaped. Editor: Exactly! Perhaps understanding the means illuminates the message—revealing the grit beneath the polish.
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This is an abstract image with residual landscape features. It relates to Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park' paintings, an extended series of pictures made between 1967 and the late 1980s, eventually numbering well over one hundred works. An important inspiration for the series were the near abstract paintings of Matisse, made between 1909 and 1916. Diebenkorn's images depict tilted-up perspectives of suburban views, criss-crossed with roadways, found on the West Coast of America where the artist lived for many years. The prints of this series, while recalling the abstract shapes and lines of Diebenkorn's paintings, are complete works in their own right. In their modest scale, they relate closely to his drawings and studies for compositions. Gallery label, September 2004
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