The Paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Plimack Mangold's work has evolved from early renderings of floors, mirrors, and rooms to landscapes (by day and by night), skyscapes, and "portraits" of individual trees done at her outdoor Hudson River valley studio. She reinvented these traditional subjects by wrestling with the very process by which the artist creates illusion, then letting the viewer in on her secret by bordering the image with illusionary "masking tape" (meticulously recreated with paint and brush) that simultaneously acknowledges and denies the painted surface.
This lavishly illustrated, full-color volume is published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Plimack Mangold's paintings organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and traveling to Hartford, Houston, and Boston. Covering more than a quarter-century of work, it includes a monographic essay by Cheryl Brutvan, Curator at the Albright-Knox, as well as full documentation of the artist's career to date: Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Selected Exhibitions and Reviews. It also reproduces a number of pages from the artist's notebooks, providing a rare, privileged glimpse at the thoughtful intelligence and aesthetic beliefs that underlie these magical canvases, canvases that give expression to the intimate reality of the artist's existence, give form to the intangible.