Richard Diebenkorn’s oeuvre is often divided into an early Abstract Expressionist period (ca. 1947–55), a figurative or representational period (ca. 1955–66), and finally a pair of later abstract periods (ca. 1967–88 and 1988–92). As most of the works in Richard Diebenkorn: Figures and Faces are drawn from the middle years of 1955–1967—with an outlier watercolor of three brightly painted derbies from 1984—the Van Doren Waxter exhibition need not concern itself with any dramatic artistic evolution or turn. Instead, as the title suggests, the show primarily deals with Diebenkorn’s distillation of the human form.
Tales of Brave Ulysses, which spans across the galleries of Van Doren Waxter and Garth Greenan, highlights a significant moment of counter-modernism within the 70s and 80s. The work of the artists Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, and Richard Van Buren are a weft and warp, interlaced in dialogue with each other to reveal an exchange of ideas and innovations.
Karin Davie is adept at ironic sleight-of-hand: she simultaneously tricks us and shows how her hocus-pocus works. In the title of this double show, she deliberately apocopates Captain Kirk’s sententious prelude in the voiceover for the original Star Trek series: “to boldly go where no man has gone before!” Her version is more conversational or vernacular, but it also calls attention to the irony of a woman’s appropriation of it.