GUY DIEHL (Suggested for Stage Six; Mastery)
Guy Diehl is a painter and printmaker noted for his intimate, meticulously detailed still life’s which frequently pay homage to significant figures from art history. Although influenced by photorealist painters such as Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean, Diehl became inspired to focus on a more minimalist aesthetic and a limited range of motifs after an encounter with the work of Giorgio Morandi. Working from photographs, his carefully considered compositions spring to life via the interplay of light, shadow, and color, giving them an emotional charge which belies their quotidian subject matter. The repeated use of central groupings and eye level perspective gives Diehl’s work a formal unity enhanced by the regular addition of postcards by painters whose work he admires, from René Magritte and Henri Matisse to Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp; their presence functions as a commentary on the complex ways in which we look at and consume art in a world of mass reproduction.