MARTHA DIAMOND

Throughout her six-decade career, Martha Diamond dedicated herself to the investigation ofbuilt environments, exploring corporeal relationships to volume and perspective that oftenmanifested through depictions of the metropolis. Born in New York City in 1944, Diamondmoved with her family to the borough of Queens. From an early age, she accompanied herfather—a doctor—on long car rides into Manhattan, where he would go on house calls.These trips imprinted the memory of urban movement, a shifting skyline, evolvinginfrastructure, and a sense of place as she continued to encounter—and draw inspirationfrom—skyscrapers in her life and work. In 1969, Diamond moved into a studio in theBowery, where she would live and work for her entire career. She drew direct inspirationfrom friends and influences, such painters as Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Franz Kline,and Jackson Pollock, and poets such as Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, andmany others. As evidenced by her long-standing friendships, Diamond was deeply investedin the community and kept an active curiosity for a range of perspectives influenced by afully engaged exterior world.

Skin of the City surveys a range of paintings on canvas and studies on board made byDiamond over two pivotal decades, during which she solidified her standing in post-warAmerican painting, specifically the New York School. The exhibition documents an intricatestudy of volume, mass, scale, and space along with the formal and thematic developmentsDiamond made during this period, characterised by earlier depictions of cityscapes frompedestrian and aerial perspectives and a later move towards the less referential visuallanguage of abstraction.

Diamond's early works responded to architectural forms and ancient monuments, such aspre-Columbian mounds—but New York City, in its many views and iterations, became hersignature motif. Vibrant paintings of the metropolis were an exercise in interrogating whatarchitecture is and can be, especially when represented in painting. However, Diamond'soeuvre moves beyond this foundational interest in modern infrastructure—it possesses anacute sense of formal exploration that pushes her work into the realm of abstraction. Usingher nondominant left hand, Diamond worked alla prima, creating gestural, almost liquid-likebrush strokes across her canvases. And, while her process evolved with maturity andknowledge of the medium, she consistently began her ideas with oil on board to addressany material concerns more immediately on a smaller scale. In the 1990s, she also addedthe creation of 'Atlases': a collection of sketchbooks filled with art, people, and places,which she continuously referenced to make her paintings.

In the 1980s, Diamond developed an emotive use of colour characterised by dramaticcontrasts of grey shadows across facades and deep blue skies, as seen in works such asHigh-C (Detail) (1982). Her continued experimentation of what a brush can do pushed hertechnical form and dedication to the aerial-viewed edifices and shadowed, noir-like cornersof Manhattan. Influenced by the motion of moving images and the shifting perspective of thecamera lens, the works Diamond made during this era call to mind cinematicrepresentations of the metropolis employed in early film noir and French new-wave cinema.In the same way that a camera lens can zoom into the non-visible towering corners of askyscraper, so too did Diamond's canvas, foregrounding a single building into a focusedimage of reflective mass and tone in a populated skyline. The late 1980s were also a time inwhich Diamond literally expanded her vision, making her largest paintings to date andworking in even more vibrant colours; the scale of these works, such as Yellow Sky (1986),allowed her to immerse herself—and the viewer—in the infrastructure she was so dedicatedto.

In Towers (1986), a wash of fleshy pink gives shape to two buildings that puncture thesurface of the canvas. Here, Diamond inscribes herself into the work, marking her place inthe memory of the buildings and the site itself by featuring two diamond-shaped rooftops atthe center of the work. The way Diamond experienced New York City and its rapidlychanging topography is crucial to understanding the development of her work. She paintedher own perception of the city and its environs from memory, interested in how places, andher own subjectivity, could leave lasting visual impressions on the mind and body.

If her paintings from the 1980s were referential to the cityscape, the 1990s was an era inwhich Diamond condensed the rush and the frenetic energy of the city by capturing itsenvironmental qualities and turning them into materially rich abstractions. Narrowing thewidth of the canvas, Diamond began working vertically as she moved away from thedefining representation of architecture toward a kind of softness that made way for lush,melting lines and over-expressive broad swaths of color. In these works, Diamond's use ofpale reds, blues, and yellows addressed more atmospheric conditions—refractive light, thedirection of wind—percolating on the surface of the canvas.

Diamond's life and work emerged from a response to her beloved New York City and theenergy that pulsed around her. Formally, her advanced understanding of the painterlymedium—specifically colour and line—was used to show the urban city in transition overseveral decades. As such, the artworks on view in Skin of the City are a direct reflection ofthe haptic encounter that the body has to space—an intimate impact in which Diamonddedicated herself so wholly to studying and depicting during her storied career.

Press release courtesy David Kordansky Gallery