Diehl's elegant and rigorously edited meditations on the history of art invite the viewer to engage in an ongoing, intuitive dialogue with the subtle themes set forth in his work. As Dr. Landauer states in the catalogue for her acclaimed exhibition "The Not-So-Still-Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture" (San Jose Museum of Art, 2003), Diehl's "straightforward tributes to personal possessions show his abiding reverence for art-historical tradition." His juxtapositions of organic objects or personal mementos, such as fruit, shells, or picture postcards, placed against stacks of books or groups of bottles speak to the ideals represented by the artists mentioned in his titles, whether it is the severity of Malevich's suprematism or the eroticism of Balthus.

In his latest work, Diehl has extended his visual vocabulary. The recurring motif of the bottle -part of an extended homage to the 20th -century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi- illustrates Diehl's ability to manipulate light and color while avoiding cliché. In Still Life with Pierre de Valenciennes (2007) the bottles and books provide an elegant, and surprising, counterpoint to the landscape depicted on the postcard. The extreme use of chiaroscuro, as seen in Still Life with Joan Brown #2 (2006), in which every object casts a shadow on to the next, always from above or the side and never from the front, creates a strong visual link that controls the eye's movement through the painting. Diehl maintains his interest in creating centrally compressed compositions that are surrounded by large areas of open space. This convention allows Diehl to highlight the extraordinary beauty in the overlooked, such as the supremely elegant structure of the envelope, a simple triangle overlaying a square that invites one to reconsider the context and hidden beauty in daily objects.

Guy Diehl's work is held in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the U.S. State Department, the City of Phoenix, and others. His work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, Visions, Artweek, and American Artist, among others. This show is his fourth solo exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery. The artist resides in Marin County, California.