The Inversion

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Brooklyn Museum photograph

Brooklyn Museum photograph

1 of 2

Object Label

Sylvia Plimack Mangold\'s The Inversion is full of polarities: images compete with a void, geometry conflicts with nature, traditional landscape painting faces off against abstraction. The artist began The Inversion as a larger work, and it forms a narrative about the painting process: "The landscape originally stretched horizontally from left to right, side to side," she wrote. "I cropped it because it didn\'t work—the negation of some areas becomes a positive element in the support of the total picture." In other words, the void at the right is a kind of negative "inversion" of the positive landscape.

Caption

Sylvia Plimack Mangold American, born 1938. The Inversion, 1984. Oil on linen, 60 × 100 in. (152.4 × 254 cm) frame: 63 × 103 × 4 1/4 in. (160 × 261.6 × 10.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt, 86.200. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 86.200_SL1.jpg)

Title

The Inversion

Date

1984

Medium

Oil on linen

Classification

Painting

Dimensions

60 × 100 in. (152.4 × 254 cm) frame: 63 × 103 × 4 1/4 in. (160 × 261.6 × 10.8 cm)

Signatures

Top right of center: "S. P. M. 1984"

Credit Line

Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt

Accession Number

86.200

Rights

© artist or artist's estate

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