A short essay by Dr. Sophie Matthiesson, Senior Curator, International Art, Auckland Art Gallery
August 11, 2025
Auckland, New Zealand
An exhibition of modern master paintings which has recently opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, culminates with Richard Diebenkorn’s majestic painting Ocean Park #32 dated 1970. Ocean Park #32 is the most recent painting in the exhibition, entitled A Century of Modern Art, which is drawn from the Toledo Museum of Art. It is the final in a sequence of five monumental paintings produced in the latter phases of their makers’ careers. Punctuating a survey of modernism, late canvases by Claude Monet, Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis and Diebenkorn attest to the obsessive logic and determination driving their makers to pursue an essential idea in all its permutations.
The first of these is a two-meter high waterlily painting by Monet, that would have dwarfed its octogenarian creator – one of over 200 compositions based on this motif that Monet completed in the final quarter of his life. The second is a classic painting of nested squares by septuagenarian, Josef Albers. Belonging to his iconic Homage to the Square series, this golden canvas is one stage in Alber’s self-imposed goal to explore the mesmerising interactions of colour and proportion. The third painting is Night Spell of 1965, a large iridescent canvas by Hans Hofmann, aged 84 in which rectangles of thickly-painted complementary colours pulsate ‘noisily’ against a textured field. One of a series of related works, Night Spell demonstrates the senior artist’s renowned theory of ‘push and pull’, in which juxtaposed planes of colour produce dynamic effects of pictorial space. The fourth painting is Dalet Tet, a late work from the heroic Veil series produced by Morris Louis streaming diluted acrylic paints over tilted unprimed canvases. Dalet Tet stops short of pure black, the sum of all colours, as skeins of dilute Magma paint gradually eliminate the presence of light in Louis’s bid to generate interactions of pure colour devoid of expressionistic gesture.
Appearing in the same room as Dalet Tet, Diebenkorn’s expansive Ocean Park #32, painted eleven years after Louis’ stained masterpiece, counters the drive to eliminate figuration that characterised painting of the post-war decade. As Diebenkorn stated: “During the ‘50’s abstract painting was a religion, and it didn’t admit any backsliding to representational imagery.” One of an epic series of 145 paintings, Ocean Park #32, infuses abstract geometric zones of colour with a sense of lived experience, as erasures, pentimenti and overpainting evoke the effects of time, indecision and the artist’s evolving thought processes. Through these subtle traces we reconstruct an elusive sense of the world in which Diebenkorn was painting: the generous volumes of his Santa Monica studio, the streaming light and blue skies seen through large steel-framed windows, and the flat terrain beyond the studio itself, where concrete roads, sand and water intersect.
A Century of Modern Art is on view at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki from June 7 to September 28, 2025. Learn more on the museum’s website here.
About Dr. Matthiesson
Sophie has more than 20 years’ experience as a curator and educator in England and Australia and previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester. Since 2007 Sophie has been Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. As the Senior Curator International Art, Sophie will work to develop and manage the Gallery’s historical and modern international art collection, including the Mackelvie collection.
Sophie’s past curatorial projects include Modern Britain (2007), Salvador Dalí (2009), Monet’s Garden (2013), Degas: A New Vision (2016) and Van Gogh: The Seasons (2017).