ART CITIES:N.York-Martha Diamond

Born and educated in New York, Martha Diamond has developed an unmistakable personal language from the forms and sensations of the city. Her painterly style, in equal measure energetic and rigorous, sharply observed and freely lyrical, mirrors the dualities of delirious New York itself with its soaring, exuberant skyscrapers and its endlessly complex street culture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

Martha Diamond in her solo exhibition “Cityscapes” a group a group of soaring, weton- wet oil paintings that evoke the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and one artists’ book. Like other natives of the New York, Martha Diamond is a great walker. She walks to see and remember the spaces and buildings, not as distinct architectural moments, but rather as pieces of her rich memory bank of human-made forms, which are her sole subject. She translates these experiences into sites for expressive, generous color and mark making. And because Diamond is a believer in systems, materials and techniques, she carefully translates these experiences into sites for expressive, generous color, and mark making. Diamond is a believer in systems, materials and techniques. Each composition begins as a small painting on masonite. Once settled, the masonite map can become the source of multiple paintings, such as “New York with Purple 1-3” (1999-2000), which presents a corner-like view, in purple, blue, and yellow, of a stick-thin edifice emerging from a bulky mass. What Diamond explains as “stuff just beginning to develop” commenced with her painting of idiosyncratic frames around older images. Leaping from the playful to the profound, this series ensconces each enigmatic image with jewel-like precision. The variable tone of Diamond’s work is given new dimension by her collage books, one of which she is showing for the first time in the exhibition. This book from the early 2000s is a catalog of images clipped from magazines, books, and newspapers. Here she groups photographs of artists, animals, outfits, and perhaps her funniest category – the fate of paintings within interior decoration. Diamond is a 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.

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, Duration: 23/6-28/7/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com