Welcome A beautiful performanceObserver highlights a recently opened museum exhibition in a museum not in New York City, and places we know and like have attracted a lot of attention.
Tiktok has a great brand that combines studio visits with striptease. The “Painting Reveal” video begins with the shy artist falling off the camera with a painting, which is already strange because the text overlay describes the terrible economic or emotional environment that leads to the creation of the work. Slowly, they turn the canvas like an issue card, with facial expressions that are proud and fragile. The best product in this genre is the young people who reveal their work is a counterfeit by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). These are so common that they lead to the subcategory “Painting Reveals, but no man copies Basquet”.
How great would it be if they all started to beat Martha Diamond (1944-2023)? The contemporary of Basquet is currently the theme of “deep” of the retrospective exhibition of the Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art. This suburban collection of paintings, works on paper and 45 years of monotypes, some of which are rarely seen, suggests the artist’s ability to portray the city’s troubled power. Diamond is often made up with new expressionists like Basquet, but she shys away from the idea that her paintings are about emotions because she is “more concerned about vision.”
This vision is usually from New York City, which is why I might want to see these Sunday painters trying to imitate her work. High-C (1982) is a city masterpiece that can only be captured by a person who is stopped outside the window, as they notice the intensity of the sunshine, how to make the skyscrapers outside look grander and sinister than before. Its yellow color is not found in nature and will destroy anyone who can be directly.
Compare this Cityscape with blue shadows (1994), in which buildings seem to melt into shadows. This otherworldly blue may look like it drips on the pedestrians below, but it’s hard to think about humans when you think about these works. The buildings themselves have enough character and will be there long after we will. Diamonds seem to imply that they are almost in front of us, so “deep age” is a term for enlightenment and geology.
See: A fascinating retrospective showcases the bizarre vision of artist and jazz witch Gertrude Abercrombie
But not all buildings. Untitled (1973) is one of her earliest mature works, seeing her blending almost all kinds of lines into the dense and colorful forest. At that time, she was inspired by Chinese brush painting. transportation (1990) is a remarkable blue phantom floating on the pink horizon. Although I was still reading this city into that city, could it be wrong? The excellent catalogue gathers works from the poet’s friends of Diamond, and these are indeed the only people I trust to explain her. Eileen Myles, a friend of the painter, wrote in 1990: “‘I don’t like the universe in public.’
“Martha Diamond: Depth“It will be on display at the Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art until May 18, 2025.
