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Sylvia Plimack Mangold (American, b. 1938). The Inversion, 1984. Oil on linen, 60 x 100 in. (152.4 x 254 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt, 86.200
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.
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum