January 7 to February 13, 2016
724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, at 57th Street
New York City, (212) 755-2828

Forty-one small paintings completed since 2002 fill the central but still relatively intimate room at Alexandre Gallery. All rectangles, many are twelve by ten inches, though some are a bit larger than that. Many are untitled or have titles generically identifying such subjects as a cityscape or church, or describing their content—Untitled Frame With Construction (2002-3) and Blue Wash (2011-14) being examples of that. Most (but not all) have internal painted frames surrounding a central image or shape. Otherwise, her compositions are very varied. Consider just three: Untitled Frame Painting (2002-3) places short vertical black lines in a frame; Untitled (2002) centers iridescent red brushstrokes on a blue background within an orange frame; and Frame Painting With Stride (2002-3) sets a striding black stick figure on a white background in a dark red frame. Sometimes Diamond’s titles are simply mysterious. Are there two philosophers in Two Philosophers (2009-15)? And what in the world are the three tie-like shapes within the frame of Untitled Frame Series With Red Yellow and Blue (2002-3)?

Diamond is devilishly hard to place. Drawing on her own comments, should we, perhaps, identify her as a very belated Abstract Expressionist who is often engaged with figurative subjects? Long ago she did express affinities felt with Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, and fascination with Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. But since her paintings look very different from any of these artists, what I think that she learned from them is the importance of incessant, willful improvisation. She certainly has an identifiable personal style. When you give them even the briefest flicker of awareness, her very varied paintings all are immediately hers. Sometimes, as Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times of her 1988 exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery, it is easy to think

[…] that there’s not much going on, that this painter of lush, fragrantly colored, nearly abstract skyscrapers and city views is falling apart in public. At times, this seems to be the case.

“But others,” this reviewer adds, “may be among the best paintings she has made.” This exhibition is different—it has some ups and downs, but I don’t find it particularly uneven. I believe, rather, that because Diamond’s happily awesome pursuit of visual variety never slips into cliché, her show is more than the sum of its parts, which is to say your pleasure in each of these painterly pictures involves awareness that many otherwise different looking paintings are at hand. In that way, the effect is the exact opposite of looking at works in series by Frank Stella, when multiple repetitions of one basic visual conception can be deadening.

So far as I can see, Diamond is a completely intuitive artist, one for whom it is hard to associate any theorizing in her pictures. This is what makes it difficult to place her historically. In the usual histories of New York painting, Abstract Expressionism yields to minimal art, Pop Art and conceptualism just when, circa 1965, she took up residence there. You don’t feel that she has much to do with these developments. In his essay “Style now” (1972) the aesthetic philosopher Richard Wollheim notes that “the most powerful pressure under which the contemporary painter labours” is the pressure “to seek recognition through the recognizability of his work.” What defines convincing art, he argues, is the achievement of a style. Style “has a unity,” which is to say that it involves employment of “something like a coherent set of rules,” which are difficult (or even impossible) to spell out in so many words. The difficulty of quantifying what is, nonetheless, a visually self-evident felt unity in this body of Diamond’s art, provides a way of placing her. In an admirably brief essay in the exhibition catalogue, Alex Katz says that these paintings “will eat up almost anything you put near them.” He’s absolutely right—they are terrific.

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June 20 to July 27, 2012
1 Rivington Street at Bowery
New York City, 212-358-8767

The first clue as to what is going on here is the deliberately quirky off-kilter hang of Martha Diamond’s new paintings. Small oils on board – more then two dozen of them, all created in the last two years –are hung in hypnotic groupings that mirror her startlingly original and lyrical imagery.

This new body of work has been painted with the flat, square-headed shorthaired brushes known as brights. A change from her usual choice, the Bright’s spatulate marks transmute to jazzy checkerboards, shadowy figures and shaggy lines. Best known for her neo-expressionist cityscapes, Diamond has always rigorously explored the nexus of abstraction and representation in her work. But her architectural sources are no longer immediately identifiable.

The abbreviated brushstrokes she’s now using create gestural markings and simplified imagery, leaping from the austere though under-painted Pentimento to the linear brevity used to playfully depict weather in Blue 1. A platform built of flat marks provides a pedestal for the enigmatic figures of Philosophe. The bright’s bristles are also responsible for the densely patterned surface of Conversation. Look closely and you can see two pixilated pugilists engaged in a digitalized punch-out.

This show represents the efflorescence of an artist who has always been passionate about paint, interested in brush stoke, color, image. But instead of the iconic wet on wet technique that has long characterized her work, Diamond has made what she describes as “the big-time change” to direct painting, beginning with white background and black paint. “I love black and white, and almost always start with black and white,” she has said. When she occasionally includes color, it is partly a result of seeing “what was under the painting”, and experimenting with “another kind of venture,” the artist has told me.

Diamond, who installed the show, views the Church series as a “sequence developed as a set.” Her methodology is both apparent and intriguing, beginning with a transparent wash in Church I, proceeding to thickly painted and brush-carved lines in Church III, and culminating with the elegant purity of Church VI, the last in the series.

The insouciance of the stripes began “as a torso seated on a swing.” The thick stripes provide a voluminous counterbalance to the obsidian foreground, using black as a note of emphasis and white as an outline. Radio City, with its brushy monolithic totem, heralds the bygone romance of the original skyscrapers and echoes the magical aura of her earlier large building paintings.

I have always loved Diamond’s direct, sinuous touch, the wet-on-wet technique that results in an urban immediacy. Portraying her native city, Diamond celebrates an ever-changing skyline.  In these small works, she has sought out other architectures investigating new landscapes. This is the work of a mature and masterful artist whose technical virtuosity and highly personal vision reinvigorate the act of painting.

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