Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)

“Diebenkorn’s interest in achieving a complete fusion of figure and ground in the abstract Berkeley works is apparent in a drawing, Untitled (Berkeley) of 1955. Spatially, the curvilinear imagery hints at three-dimensionality but is situated on an emphatically two-dimensional picture plane that can be viewed with equal emphasis from any of the four major orientations […] Untitled (Berkeley) records Diebenkorn’s interest in the type of mutable biomorphic imagery associated with Surrealism and embraced for its pictorial potential by Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning” (T. Burgard, “The Nature of Abstraction: Richard Diebenkorn’s Berkeley Period” in Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years 1953-1966, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2013, p. 32).