The SFMOMA’s two massive Sol LeWitt atrium wall drawings – the last works still up from his retrospective in 2000 – are being painted over to make room for an upcoming Martin Puryear installation.
It doesn’t sadden me that they’re no longer on view. Because the instruction set is the kernel of the work and can lead to infinite authentic resurrections, the piece is simply in one less place. What’s more poignant to me is that after eight years the exhibition that changed the course of my personal, artistic, and professional life has finally concluded.
I feel fortunate that my first encounter with Conceptual Art wasn’t a chilly philosophical affair. For while a Kosuth or Art and Language show would has been just as likely to pique my interest in this realm of art making, I’m grateful that it came in visual terms. And in Sol’s unique way. His work’s breathtaking delicacy, lyricism, intellectual rigor, and modesty are core features of the best art I could make and, by proxy, of the best life I could lead.
While his SFMOMA retrospective is now relegated to memory, I suppose it always was. Our lives are lived in recollection, looking back on the wake of experience cast off from the fleeting present.
And since Sol’s work is fundamentally about the idea behind the work his pieces seem architected in the language of memory. It’s appropriate, then, that his retrospective is now over – freed from binding physicality and loosened into the realm of remembrance.
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 67, 1973, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 in.
Terrific news for those Diebenkorn fans out there: a retrospective of the Ocean Park series will be debuting at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2009.
“Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967 to 1985
Newport Beach
Oct 11, 2009 – Mar 14, 2010
Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967 to 1985 is the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s most celebrated series. Recognized as a leading West Coast Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Diebenkorn turned his attention to figurative painting in 1955 and achieved equal success in this alternate style. In 1968 he returned to abstraction, and during the next twenty years would forge one of the most compelling and masterful bodies of work of the 20th century: the Ocean Park series. Featuring nearly 75 works—including paintings, prints, drawings, and collages—this exhibition captures Diebenkorn’s practice of working simultaneously in diverse media and provides audiences with the first opportunity to explore the complexity of Diebenkorn’s artistic and aesthetic concerns in this seminal body of work. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 250-page fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, and will tour in 2010.
This exhibition is organized by Sarah Bancroft, curator at OCMA.”
Rumors have it that the show will travel to Washington DC so East Coasters like myself won’t have to make a trip to see it (although it will definitely be worth the trip).
More Diebenkorn posts coming soon… What a guy – what a San Franciscan!
