Untitled [female nude seated on stool with hands on knees] 1955 - 1967

Curator: So striking. Looking at Richard Diebenkorn’s "Untitled [female nude seated on stool with hands on knees]" from somewhere between 1955 and 1967, my first thought is: vulnerable. She just *exists*, right here, right now, completely exposed. What about you? Editor: Well, I appreciate the honesty of the piece. The energetic use of ink definitely captures movement; there is very little solid mass or line. Yet, simultaneously, her position seems very contained, and fixed in place. I think there’s an interesting play in her composition. Curator: I feel that too. It’s raw, like a charcoal sketch, but rendered in sweeping ink strokes. There is the electric blue, and her gaze… deliberately obscured. A study in contrasts. Do you find that abstraction protective, even defiant? Editor: Absolutely. Note how Diebenkorn uses this overlay to distance her; he withholds, perhaps inviting us to engage instead with the materiality. I am very taken by how he navigates positive and negative spaces with these expressive marks, so as not to conceal all together but create a new reality of representation that transcends the traditional portrait. Curator: Absolutely. It’s almost like he is showing us the *process* of seeing. Each choice seems deliberate in this. Even with what the piece obscures or doesn't clearly present in terms of representing its subject. Diebenkorn forces us to bring ourselves, our gaze to that table, too, so to speak. A dialogue between viewer and art! And then us again back on to that seat with the subject of the piece. Editor: Exactly, so ultimately the figure emerges with even more profound impact; despite any obscuring features, we gain an understanding and feel connected with her existence. Curator: Mmm, absolutely. It seems, even in incompleteness or its abstract essence, that a dialogue between gazes in the construction of self are on show. What remains. What gets projected, abstracted and, still, what sings and emerges so profoundly? Editor: Agreed. Diebenkorn really has produced such an arresting exploration here in this piece, an act of both concealing and revealing at the very same moment, somehow…