Martha Diamond: Deep Time

Your life is defined in time. The way I relate to this in my work is by thinking of infinity: to the time of religion, of history … using shapes that have been significant to people for thousands of years.

—Martha Diamond, interviewed for the Whitney Biennial 1989

Martha Diamond is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Comprised of paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

As a concept, deep time has two histories: Enlightenment scientists, poets, and theologians have theorized it to trace symmetries and parallels across the development of human civilization, and geologists use it to describe cycles of stability and upheaval across many millions of years on this planet. In conversation with both ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, and carrying its own distinctive psychology and ecology, Diamond’s art thinks about time and across time.

This exhibition spotlights the architectural and compositional fascinations that define Diamond’s singular vision. It emphasizes her unswerving commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. The exhibition features rarely seen pieces from the Lower Manhattan studio Diamond has occupied since 1969, from the little-known “single-picture” images of the 1970s to the vertiginous paintings of her native New York City during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to the vivid abstractions that increasingly characterized her later work.