"I assume that this will go on, that we will loop through the exhibition enjoying these whimsical and brilliant explorations of perception, of what is real and why that matters. That to reward our fidelity to looking closely, the presence of the artist will be found within the work again and again in a happy game of hide-and-go-seek, and that then we will be on our way.
But Sylvia is not done.
We turn into the last room of the gallery and grow quiet. A September Passage, a large painting made in 1984, fills the wall in front of us."
"Over her six-decade career, Plimack Mangold has explored the conundrum of perception and representation, crisply summarized by the ten works included in Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975–84. Last shown together in 1994 during the artist’s retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the selections include loans from the artist, the Lewitt Collection, and other private collections."
"Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975–84” at Craig Starr is a concise exhibition that—as the title implies—includes work predating her exclusive focus on the maple. But her inimitable, exacting approach is no less formidable, and the variety of work on view here, from a fruitful nine-year run long ago, delivers surprising drama...
As the title “Tapes, Fields, and Trees” indicates, the exhibition of ten works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Craig Starr Gallery draws on three bodies of her early work. In the mid-1970s, she made Minimalist paintings of tape measures. Pieces like Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor, however, reveal a surprising poetry in seemingly prosaic subjects. Then she painted grids, like the one in Painted Graph Paper. Finally, in a remarkable transition, she drew a window looking out on a landscape and then depicted trees in that landscape as in The Pin Oak...
The most memorable show I saw this past year was an exquisite exhibition of Sylvia Plimack Mangold...
I went to the exhibition Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967–1976 at Craig F. Starr Gallery (February 5 – March 26, 2016) because I did not want to miss this rare gathering of works, many of which are in private collections. The other, more primal reason was because I have always gotten a tangible pleasure from them.
