The American painter Richard Diebenkorn (born in 1922 Portland/Oregon, died 1993 in Berkeley/CA) is recognized internationally as one of the important protagonists of Abstract Expressionism. His artistic development can be grouped into three stages: After an early period of colorfully Abstract Expressionist paintings dominated by strong brushworks in the late 1940s, he turned to figuration in an intermediate period in the 1950s and reverted back to abstract painting in the late 1960s, where he developed one of his most comprehensive bodies of work, the Ocean Park series. It consists of well over 100 works, one of which, the paper work number 13, is included in The UBS Art Collection. In both his figurative and his abstract paintings, the exploration of contrasting color-fields, form and light remained Diebenkorn’s ongoing interest. In the late 1960s the artist moved to the beachside community Ocean Park in Venice, Southern California, surroundings which became the inspiration for the series of the same title, representing this urban Californian landscape in variations of planar rectangular compositions. Combining abstract monochrome color-fields of intense brushwork, the vertical and geometric compositions of the series represent this Californian surrounding with allusions to sunlight, the sky and the ocean, the greens and gardens, and its architecture.

The paper work in The UBS Art Collection is a composition dominated by a large yellow shape, which could stand for sunlight. Seemingly composed as a collage principle, the yellow is intersected by a white square on its upper right, including a black abstract shape alluding to a roof and an arcade-entrance, which symbolizes a certain type of architecture in Venice. Parallel to the horizontal dimension of the paper work, a field of green, intersected by a white curvilinear form and framed by a black line, which could be interpreted as the street-level, provides an abstract allusion to the greens and gardens of the area. Although the complete Ocean Park series is connected through compositional similarities, each work presents an individually balanced chromatic palette which is as much abstract as it is referential.

Reference: The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, by Jane Livingston, John Elderfield, Ruth Fine, Richard Diebenkorn, Whitney Museum of American Art.