Martha Diamond @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Deep Time" Exhibition

Martha Diamond: Deep Time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,  Ridgefield 

November 17, 2024 - May 18, 2025 

MARTA DIAMOND 

Untitled, 1973 

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches 

Collection of Jasper Campshure 

Photo: Jason Mandella 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Deep Time, a traveling survey of five decades of work by MARTA DIAMOND, marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation in thirty-six years. Martha Diamond: Deep Time is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph. 

Martha Diamond’s ties to The Aldrich extend back to 1972 when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, visited the artist’s Bowery studio and purchased the sevenby-six-foot acrylic on canvas painting, Untitled, 1972, marking her first museum acquisition. This painting was included in Martha Diamond’s debut exhibition, Contemporary Reflections 1972-73, an annual series at the Museum that spotlighted emerging artists with no gallery representation. Aldrich bought another painting from Martha Diamond a year later, Untitled, 1973. It would be included in three more exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at The Aldrich. Now in the Museum’s 60th anniversary year, Untitled, 1973 makes its return as the earliest work in Deep Time. 

Martha Diamond, who passed away in December 2023, is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Encompassing paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

Deep time is a concept used to explore thousands of years of human civilization and billions of years of planetary history. In conversation with ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, the exhibition emphasizes Martha Diamond’s commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Martha Diamond’s relationship to the built landscape of New York was surely informed by her more than 50 years spent maintaining her studio in the Bowery, demonstrating her tremendous perseverance as an artist and her rootedness in a single place over time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work. 

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum. 

MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School, and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the Museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. 

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Martha Diamond Exhibition @ Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY - Broad Strokes

Martha Diamond: Broad Strokes 

Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY 

July 22 - August 15, 2017 

Harper’s presents Broad Strokes, an exhibition of work by New York-based painter MARTHA DIAMOND. Comprised of both historic and more recent paintings on linen.

On display on the first floor are two distinct bodies of work that Martha Diamond produced during the 1980s and the mid-2000s. In a series of large paintings on linen, Diamond loosely renders tall buildings and complex cityscapes. Her painterly vocabulary is assembled from saturated skeins of color, and thick, gestural brushwork that reveal the effect of light on the urban environment, including early morning fog, and the shadows of twilight. In her essay for Diamond’s 1990 show at Robert Miller Gallery, the poet Eileen Myles noted: “Martha Diamond seems to be painting ‘the present,’ whether it’s big or little parts of buildings, specks of dust or paint strokes floating in a raspberry sky...”

Martha Diamond relies as much on personal history as she does on direct observation to assemble her paintings, and her style is marked by the way in which she takes liberties with her subject matter. Façades and shadows function as generative material for Diamond’s expressionistic gestures, in a way that moves her paintings beyond more faithful forms of representation. Her pictures skirt the edge of legibility, and while certain works might telegraph the silhouette of a skyline, others disassemble into complex patterns of faceted planes. 

In another series of vertically oriented canvases, Martha Diamond abandons any pretense toward representation and works instead within a rigorous syntax of horizontal bands in black and white. Her reduced palette and rhythmic fields of parallel bars trade-in questions of surface and depth as they shuttle between flatness and deep space. Though radically different in their painterly strategies, both bodies of work exploit a particular brand of wet-on-wet painting, which has come to define Diamond’s mature style. Heavy impasto registered with wide brushes lends her work a chunky heft that compliments both her abstract and more representational compositions.

Martha Diamond is a longtime veteran of the downtown New York art world, and she’s maintained a studio practice in the same Bowery loft since she took up residence in 1969. Her signature approach to representational painting was forged in a crucible of artists and poets who championed the centrality of personal experience in creative production, paying particular attention to the ways in which one’s perceptions of New York City could be translated into art. Alongside painters like Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers, as well as poets like Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Peter Schjeldahl, Diamond worked at the margins of the city at a time when light and space were in ample supply. In a manner that differentiates her from her counterparts, however, Diamond has continually chronicled the changing character of New York’s urban environment, recalling the city’s most celebrated documentarians, including photographers like Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand. From her Bowery loft, Diamond makes images of the built environment that teeter on the verge of dissolution, in the foggy glow of an early morning sunrise, or the incandescent pattern thrown from the windows of a residential high rise.

MARTHA DIAMOND (b. 1944, New York, NY) lives and works in New York City. Diamond received a BA from Carleton College, Northfield, MN and an MA from New York University. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including Alexandre Gallery, New York; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; Robert Miller Gallery, New York; and Sue Scott Gallery, New York. Diamond’s work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions both stateside and abroad, including shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Nagoya Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan; and the Whitney Museum, New York, among other institutions.

Martha Diamond’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Staatliche Museum, Berlin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

HARPER'S EAST HAMPTON

87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.harpersgallery.com