Peter Darach
Megan Piper Gallery, London
2-22 November
The painter’s first solo outing since 1983, Peter Darach’s exhibition of recent work also represents his debut at a commercial gallery, in keeping with Piper’s concentration on older, often overlooked artists. Darach has not always worked on the fringes, however. Born in Derbyshire in 1940, the painter trained at the Royal College of Art and exhibited with Ken Kiff and Timothy Hyman in the 1970s. His charcoal-washed paintings on cardboard—woozy, agitated, densely constructed—are populated with a flurry of figures in scenes of confusion. Darach’s layered, autobiographical work depicts the mayhem of everyday life, where everything, and nothing, happens. Prices range from £8,000 to £28,000.
Courtesy of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Van Doren Waxter
Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper, 1955-67
Van Doren Waxter, New York
8 November-20 January 2018
Organised in collaboration with the Diebenkorn Foundation, this show highlights a lesser known facet of the Bay Area artist’s work, from a mid-life decade when he bucked not only the prevailing abstraction, but also his established style and embraced figurative painting. A shift toward domesticity is evident across more than two dozen of these cosily scaled works on paper—a blustery depiction of a sitting woman, a dog sleeping on a daybed strewn with patterned cloth—most exhibited for the first time. Many are emblematic of what curator John Elderfield called “the splendid clumsiness” of Richard Diebenkorn’s drawing. Prices range from $55,000 to $350,000.
Agnew's
Lotte Laserstein’s Women
Agnew’s Gallery, London
9 November-15 December
Having mounted an exhibition of the painter 30 years ago, Agnew’s revisits Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993) with a display of her female subjects in advance of the Städel Museum’s retrospective in September 2018. Among the first women to graduate from the Berlin Art Academy, Laserstein thrived in Weimar Germany before she was designated “three-quarter Jew” and forced into exile in Sweden. While her penetrating realism fell from fashion with the birth of abstraction, it is now getting its due. In 2010, Evening Over Potsdam (1930), bought from Agnew’s 1987 exhibition, sold for over £420,000 (with fees) at Sotheby’s London. Prices range from under £10,000 to £125,000.