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Craig Starr Gallery is pleased to announce Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84, on view from October 24, 2024, through January 25, 2025.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Plimack Mangold developed a distinctive artistic vocabulary, incorporating motifs such as floors, mirrors, rulers, and tiles, drawn from her studio and home surroundings. These motifs were also devices used to construct her work, making the paintings into reflections on the tools and processes of their own making. This body of work was highlighted in Craig Starr Gallery鈥檚 2016 exhibition, Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967-76.

The present exhibition focuses on the further development of Plimack Mangold鈥檚 practice with the introduction of three new motifs: masking tape, landscapes, and trees. Over the following decade (1975-84), Plimack Mangold used these motifs in a variety of paintings and drawings to continue her investigation of perception and representation.

According to the artist, her introduction of illusionistically painted tape in the mid-1970s came from her desire to further reveal the devices and processes used to construct her pictures. Following her early work, Plimack Mangold turned her attention away from the depiction of objects, such as rulers or tapes, as if they were 鈥渙bserved鈥� inside the painted image, towards the representation of these objects on top of the picture plane, performing the same functions they did in the creation of the picture. 鈥淎 painted ruler would measure things, the painted tiles would measure space,鈥� Mangold stated at the time, 鈥淭his was diagramming how one鈥檚 perspective determines perception.鈥� Plimack Mangold鈥檚 masking tape is not simply a two-dimensional trompe l鈥檕eil image but rather a simulation of real tape made out of acrylic paint, with relief edges and as layers on top of the painted surface.

These works gradually developed into a body of work where the artist focused solely on depicting the materials she used. The illusionary rulers and tapes served to mark or measure the edges of the actual canvas, emphasizing the process behind the creation of the images. The 鈥渆mpty鈥� center fields allowed her to apply paint more freely than before, 鈥淭ired of truthful considerations鈥揑 am thinking of making selections for pleasure鈥搕hat is the pleasure of a sensuous surface over a logical one.鈥� These compositions, like the paintings Thirty-Six-Inch Closeness, 1976, and Four Coats, 1976, both on view in this exhibition, function almost as displays that reveal their materials鈥揺xposed canvas or paint as paint鈥揳nd the visual effects鈥揳 record of mark making鈥搕hat form the basis of the painted picture.