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The Inversion

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Contemporary Art

On View: Luce Visible Storage and Study Center, 5th Floor
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.
MEDIUM Oil on linen
DATES 1984
DIMENSIONS 60 × 100 in. (152.4 × 254 cm) frame: 63 × 103 × 4 1/4 in. (160 × 261.6 × 10.8 cm)  (show scale)
SIGNATURE Top right of center: "S. P. M. 1984"
COLLECTIONS Contemporary Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 86.200
CREDIT LINE Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is on view in Luce Visible Storage and Study Center, 5th Floor
CAPTION Sylvia Plimack Mangold (American, born 1938). The Inversion, 1984. Oil on linen, 60 × 100 in. (152.4 × 254 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)
IMAGE overall, 86.200_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
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RIGHTS STATEMENT © Sylvia Plimack Mangold
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