The Paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold, 1994

The catalogue for an exhibit of Mangold’s paintings originating at the Albright-Knox and then shown at The Wadsworth Atheneum, University of Houston, and the MFA (11/95-2/96), this book is a useful description of Plimack Mangold’s work, progressing from her earliest studies of parquet floors, mirrors, and hallways through her late ‘90’s work on trees, landscapes, and nocturnal meditations. Her use of perspective, details, and artificial technical items like rulers and masking tape are discussed as the tension between her realist and minimalist influences. She is compared to Cezanne for her immersion in nature and its challenge of presenting the three dimensional variety of nature in a two dimensional form limited by oil paints and brushes. I love her work and will follow up with a view to acquiring some of her works on paper.