Irina Kulik will concentrate on potential liaisons between two eminent artists who have pushed forward the medium of landscape painting in the contemporary period.
American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) is known for his paintings, graphic art, and prints, evolving from early abstractions, influenced by AbEx, to more representational works and abstract paintings of a more lyrical manner of the later decades. Diebenkorn represented the USA art the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978 with Ocean Park paintings—one of his signature series depicting enigmatic color abstract landscapes, which he was working on for eighteen years. In 1964–65 he traveled to Europe and the USSR, where he saw the State Hermitage’s collection of Henri Matisse that also informed his works executed upon his return to California.
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Peter Doig lived in Canada as a child, studied at London’s Chelsea College of Art, receiving an MA in 1990, and finally settled in Trinidad in 2002. One of the most notable figurative painters of the contemporary period, his enigmatically idiosyncratic works often resemble painterly versions of photographs, depicting landscapes of particular places visited or remembered by the artist. A Turner Prize nominee (1994), Doig is represented in the world’s top museum collections, including Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Munich, MoMA New York, Art Institute of Chicago, and many others.
