MARTHA DIAMOND Skin of the City

Throughout her six-decade career, Martha Diamond dedicated herself to the investigation of built environments, exploring corporeal relationships to volume and perspective that often manifested through depictions of the metropolis. Born in New York City in 1944, Diamond moved with her family to the borough of Queens. From an early age, she accompanied her father—a doctor—on long car rides into Manhattan, where he would go on house calls. These trips imprinted the memory of urban movement, a shifting skyline, evolving infrastructure, and a sense of place as she continued to encounter—and draw inspiration from—skyscrapers in her life and work. In 1969, Diamond moved into a studio in the Bowery, where she would live and work for her entire career. She drew direct inspiration from friends and influences, such painters as Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, and poets such as Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and many others. As evidenced by her long-standing friendships, Diamond was deeply invested in the community and kept an active curiosity for a range of perspectives influenced by a fully engaged exterior world.

Skin of the City surveys a range of paintings on canvas and studies on board made by Diamond over two pivotal decades, during which she solidified her standing in post-war American painting, specifically the New York School. The exhibition documents an intricate study of volume, mass, scale, and space along with the formal and thematic developments Diamond made during this period, characterized by earlier depictions of cityscapes from pedestrian and aerial perspectives and a later move towards the less referential visual language of abstraction.

Diamond’s early works responded to architectural forms and ancient monuments, such as pre-Columbian mounds—but New York City, in its many views and iterations, became her signature motif. Vibrant paintings of the metropolis were an exercise in interrogating what architecture is and can be, especially when represented in painting. However, Diamond’s oeuvre moves beyond this foundational interest in modern infrastructure—it possesses an acute sense of formal exploration that pushes her work into the realm of abstraction. Using her nondominant left hand, Diamond worked alla prima, creating gestural, almost liquid-like brush strokes across her canvases. And, while her process evolved with maturity and knowledge of the medium, she consistently began her ideas with oil on board to address any material concerns more immediately on a smaller scale. In the 1990s, she also added the creation of “Atlases”: a collection of sketchbooks filled with art, people, and places, which she continuously referenced to make her paintings.

In the 1980s, Diamond developed an emotive use of color characterized by dramatic contrasts of gray shadows across facades and deep blue skies, as seen in works such as High-C (Detail) (1982). Her continued experimentation of what a brush can do pushed her technical form and dedication to the aerial-viewed edifices and shadowed, noir-like corners of Manhattan. Influenced by the motion of moving images and the shifting perspective of the camera lens, the works Diamond made during this era call to mind cinematic representations of the metropolis employed in early film noir and French new-wave cinema. In the same way that a camera lens can zoom into the non-visible towering corners of a skyscraper, so too did Diamond’s canvas, foregrounding a single building into a focused image of reflective mass and tone in a populated skyline. The late 1980s were also a time in which Diamond literally expanded her vision, making her largest paintings to date and working in even more vibrant colors; the scale of these works, such as Yellow Sky (1986), allowed her to immerse herself—and the viewer—in the infrastructure she was so dedicated to.

In Towers (1986), a wash of fleshy pink gives shape to two buildings that puncture the surface of the canvas. Here, Diamond inscribes herself into the work, marking her place in the memory of the buildings and the site itself by featuring two diamond-shaped rooftops at the center of the work. The way Diamond experienced New York City and its rapidly changing topography is crucial to understanding the development of her work. She painted her own perception of the city and its environs from memory, interested in how places, and her own subjectivity, could leave lasting visual impressions on the mind and body.

If her paintings from the 1980s were referential to the cityscape, the 1990s was an era in which Diamond condensed the rush and the frenetic energy of the city by capturing its environmental qualities and turning them into materially rich abstractions. Narrowing the width of the canvas, Diamond began working vertically as she moved away from the defining representation of architecture toward a kind of softness that made way for lush, melting lines and over-expressive broad swaths of color. In these works, Diamond’s use of pale reds, blues, and yellows addressed more atmospheric conditions—refractive light, the direction of wind—percolating on the surface of the canvas.

Diamond’s life and work emerged from a response to her beloved New York City and the energy that pulsed around her. Formally, her advanced understanding of the painterly medium—specifically color and line—was used to show the urban city in transition over several decades. As such, the artworks on view in Skin of the City are a direct reflection of the haptic encounter that the body has to space—an intimate impact in which Diamond dedicated herself so wholly to studying and depicting during her storied career.