Gagosian now represents the late American painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), bringing one of postwar America’s most revered modernists back into its stable more than thirty years after hosting Diebenkorn’s final solo paintings exhibition during his lifetime.
The gallery will mark the occasion with a career-spanning exhibition at its Madison Avenue flagship opening November 8. Curated by Jasper Sharp in collaboration with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the show will feature works from every period of the artist’s six-decade career—from early California landscapes and wartime watercolors to the celebrated Ocean Park abstractions.
Among the highlights on view: a 1943 watercolor nodding to Edward Hopper and Cézanne; a rarely seen 1960 monumental canvas of nudes influenced by Matisse; and several late works on paper in gouache, ink, and charcoal that reveal Diebenkorn’s enduring fascination with structure and revision.
Larry Gagosian, who first exhibited Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings in 1992, said in a press release that, “Richard Diebenkorn was an incredibly important figure of the postwar era whose work remains influential today. We got to know each other in California, and I was fortunate to visit his studio a handful of times.”
The announcement also arrives amid wobbly market results for the artist. In 2023, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad (1965) fetched $46.4 million at Christie’s New York, setting one of the highest auction prices for a postwar American painter. But not every sale has soared: last year two Ocean Park paintings failed to sell at Christie’s last year despite lofty estimates ranging from $7 million to $25 million. One of those two, Ocean Park 126 (1984), sold for nearly $24 million at Christie’s in 2018.
Still, the new partnership between Gagosian and the Diebenkorn Foundation suggests a fresh institutional push to reaffirm the artist’s relevance—and market—nearly a century after his birth. After all, more than a few major institutions hold Diebenkorn’s work: Art Institute in Chicago, the Met, AKG in Buffalo and MoMA, among more. So, sure, there have been a few misses at auction. But perhaps Larry Gagosian knows something the rest of the art world doesn’t. (And if we are honest, isn’t that always the case?)
