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Winter Writing
Winter Writing
Winter Writing

Winter Writing

Artist (American, born 1938)
Date1984
MediumOil on linen
DimensionsOverall: 60 × 80 in. (152.4 × 203.2 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Object number2002.18
Status
Not on view
Copyright© Sylvia Plimack Mangold
Category
Label TextThe paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold braid together traditional realism and Minimalism. For her early paintings, she used rulers, graph paper, and masking tape to meticulously render in acrylic paint the scale and grid pattern of the parquet wood floors in her studio/apartment. Her realism eventually developed into an acute analysis of the nature of depiction itself.

In the 1980s, Plimack Mangold’s work evolved from renderings of floors and rooms to depictions of landscapes around her Hudson River Valley studio. Painting the landscape through different seasons, the artist used color to evoke elements of atmosphere and time. In Winter Writing, 1984, a gentle, nonrepresentational blue zone defines the upper quarter of the canvas. This flat field of color ends abruptly as it meets a ridge of trompe l’oeil masking tape. The “tape” continues along the side and bottom of the canvas, framing a winter landscape. The artist rendered each leafless tree as a haunting calligraphic form. Within the taped boundaries, a hazy, white, winter sky suggests that summer has been pictorially covered, literally taped over, by winter.

The masking tape and the paint drips the artist deliberately left visible bring us back to the immediate subject: painting. By pointing out the elusive distinctions between illusion and reality, Plimack Mangold reinvests the genre of trompe l’oeil painting with a new quality of immediacy.