Brooklyn Museum: Contemporary Art: The Inversion

The Inversion

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.

Artist: Sylvia Plimack Mangold, American, born 1938
Medium: Oil on linen
Dates: 1984
Dimensions: 60 x 100 in. (152.4 x 254 cm)
Signature: Top right of center: "S. P. M. 1984"
Collections: Contemporary Art
Museum Location: This item is not on view
Accession Number: 86.200
Credit Line: Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt
Image: Overall, 86.200_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Collections: Contemporary Art: The Inversion